The study, led by Åsa Tjulin of Mid Sweden University together with colleagues including Ann Rudman, interviewed 13 final-year nursing students from four Swedish universities between February and May 2025. Using semi-structured interviews conducted over Zoom—three individual sessions and four small-group interviews averaging around 80 minutes each—the researchers explored how students construct the notion of an attractive workplace during clinical placements. The Swedish nursing programme, a three-year bachelor’s degree of 180 ECTS credits, includes roughly 43 weeks of clinical practice in line with European Union requirements that at least half of training be clinically oriented. That substantial immersion in real healthcare settings, the researchers argue, makes placements a critical and previously underexamined arena where career decisions quietly take shape.

The analysis employed reflexive thematic analysis, an inductive, data-driven approach situated within a constructionist epistemology, meaning the researchers treated meaning as co-produced through participants’ accounts and their own interpretative work. Three authors engaged collaboratively and recursively in data familiarisation, coding, and theme development, treating coding as an evolving interpretative process rather than the application of a fixed frame. What emerged from this process was a striking four-part structure—Becoming, Belonging, Balancing, and Beyond—unified under an overarching pattern the researchers describe as looking ahead: workplace attractiveness as a socialisation process.

The first theme, Becoming, captures how decisively the quality of a student’s introduction shapes their verdict on a workplace. Students described placements where no one knew who they were, where no schedule existed, and where they did not even know whom to shadow. One student recalled receiving no introduction at all and concluded bluntly: ‘I’m never coming back here.’ Conversely, workplaces that offered structured onboarding—a list of key concepts, a group introduction, a clear schedule—produced an immediate sense of security. The supervisor emerged as the pivotal figure, capable of transforming a placement through warmth, tailored learning challenges, and expressed confidence in the student’s abilities. ‘My supervisor didn’t see me as a student but as a colleague in training—that made all the difference,’ one participant explained. Where supervision was absent or delegated to newly graduated nurses still uncomfortable with workplace routines themselves, students reported insecurity, passivity, and a corrosive sense of being unwanted.

The second theme, Belonging, revealed that the most enduring impressions of a workplace rarely concerned workload or patient cases at all. Instead, they revolved around co-workers: the person who asked how you were feeling, protected time for a coffee break, or created moments when the team genuinely felt like a team. Students described the significance of tone, jargon, and lunch-table dynamics, and singled out teams where mutual support was evident and questions were welcomed. ‘If you have a good manager and a good team, then for me personally, the other things are somewhat secondary,’ one student said. The inverse was equally powerful. Environments marked by gossip, complaints, and subtle exclusion created emotional distance that no engaging clinical task could overcome. As one student put it: ‘It wasn’t the patients who discouraged me—it was the colleagues.’

The third theme, Balancing, addressed the practical architecture of a sustainable working life. Students found workplaces attractive when schedules, geographical location, and organisational support could be reconciled with personal life and family obligations. Placements exposed them to the striking diversity of scheduling practices across primary care centres, hospital wards, emergency departments, and ambulance services, prompting reflection on how working hours would fit with leisure and family. Some discovered, with relief, that not all healthcare work meant evenings and weekends. Proximity to home and family emerged as vital for both emotional well-being and logistical sustainability, particularly for students with children or those hoping to remain in rural hometowns without sacrificing professional opportunity. Manageable workloads that allowed breaks, recovery, and reflection with supervisors fostered a sense of camaraderie—moments of laughter and genuine inquiry about one’s well-being that students read as signals of a workplace worth joining.

The fourth theme, Beyond, concerned growth and the future. Attractiveness was closely linked to optimism about professional development, to the desire not to ‘become another number in the region’s workforce statistics’ but to shape one’s own path with organisational support. Yet this theme also exposed a tension at the heart of clinical placements: the collision between education and recruitment. Students described being courted directly or subtly, sometimes within days of arriving, with phrases like ‘You’re welcome back later’ or ‘We’re looking for people.’ Some found these gestures affirming; others felt reduced to a staffing resource rather than a learner. ‘It felt like they mainly needed staff—not that they cared about how I was doing as a student,’ one participant said. Students also expressed ambivalence about temporary agency nursing, acknowledging its higher wages and scheduling freedom while worrying that fragmented teams, high turnover, and diminished continuity undermined both care quality and their own prospects for growth and belonging.

The researchers interpret these findings through the lens of organisational socialisation theory, which holds that successful adaptation to a workplace depends on three core processes: task mastery, role clarity, and social acceptance. These processes are known to predict well-being, performance, and retention among employees. The new study extends that framework backwards in time, showing that the evaluative work underlying recruitment and retention begins before employment does. The findings also draw on social identity theory, suggesting that when students are treated as future colleagues, they experience a shift in self-categorisation—from peripheral outsiders to legitimate members of the professional in-group. Being addressed as a colleague provides symbolic confirmation that the workplace recognises their potential to become nurses within it, and attractiveness functions as an assessment of whether that professional identity is realistically inhabitable there. Workplaces characterised by high turnover and fragmented teams were met with scepticism precisely because they offered unstable ground for identification.

The implications reach well beyond nursing education. With the World Health Organization and successive workforce reports documenting persistent global nursing shortages and turnover, the study suggests that recruitment strategies focused solely on structural reforms or employer branding may miss the point. Attractiveness, in this account, is not a fixed attribute of an organisation but a dynamic, relational process constructed through everyday interactions—being acknowledged, invited into conversation, entrusted with meaningful responsibility. The authors recommend structured onboarding that begins before placement, dedicated primary supervisors backed by additional support, regular feedback and reflection, and active inclusion in the wider team. Nurse managers, they argue, must ensure supervisors are formally appointed, adequately prepared, and given time and resources, while keeping educational goals primary so that staffing needs do not overshadow learning. Educational institutions, meanwhile, should help students articulate and critically examine their emerging perceptions rather than leaving those evaluations implicit.

The authors acknowledge limitations: the findings are situated in Swedish nursing education and may transfer differently to other national contexts, all participants were final-year students approaching graduation, and the Zoom-based, partly group-interview format may have shaped disclosure. Even so, the central message carries weight for any healthcare system confronting workforce crisis. Students are not waiting until graduation to evaluate employers; they are deciding, week by week and interaction by interaction, whether a workplace is somewhere they can imagine a sustainable professional life. Attractiveness, the study concludes, is not a promise a workplace makes but a lived practice it either sustains or squanders—one coffee break, one introduction, one moment of recognition at a time.

Subject of Research: How nursing students construct workplace attractiveness during clinical placements

Article Title: ‘Is This the Workplace for Me?’ A Qualitative Study of Nursing Students' Construction of Workplace Attractiveness in Clinical Placement

Article References: Tjulin, Å., Cederlund, J., Chaikiat Ståhl, Å., Brulin, E., Landstad, B. J., Jacobsson, M., Härgestam, M., & Rudman, A. (2026). ‘Is This the Workplace for Me?’ A Qualitative Study of Nursing Students' Construction of Workplace Attractiveness in Clinical Placement. Nursing Open, 13(10), Article e70868. https://doi.org/10.1002/nop2.70868

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1002/nop2.70868

Keywords: nursing students, clinical placement, workplace attractiveness, organisational socialisation, qualitative research, thematic analysis, nurse retention, workforce recruitment, supervision, belonging, social identity theory, healthcare workforce