When did "essential" stop meaning "included"?
We built a profession. We forgot to build its future.
A little over a week ago I was sitting on a folding chair placed over an ice rink, waiting for my name to be called at my MBA commencement.
After years of coursework while balancing a full-time career, a business, and a family, I was finally done. I was trying to take it all in at once: the relief, the exhaustion, the late nights, the people who carried me through it.
Then the nursing graduates started crossing the stage.
One by one, 23 new Doctors of Nursing Practice were hooded. I was impressed. But what stayed with me was not the degree itself. It was the infrastructure behind it. Those graduates were entering a profession that had already decided nurses should not only care for patients, but teach, influence policy, shape systems, lead service lines, and sit in executive roles with real organizational authority.
I am a credentialed veterinary technologist with a bachelor's in veterinary technology, a bachelor's in business administration, and now an MBA. Sitting over that ice rink, I found myself asking a question I still cannot shake: where is the veterinary equivalent?
I want to be clear about what I am asking. I am not asking about shift supervision. I am not asking about hospital management in the broadest sense, or the occasional director title that appears here and there. I am asking whether veterinary medicine will ever truly build a real leadership pathway for veterinary nurses and technicians. One that allows credentialed professionals to influence workforce strategy, education, patient-care systems, quality, operations, and the future direction of the profession itself.
Human nursing did not drift into leadership. It built there.
The American Nurses Association's own history is candid about this: at the turn of the twentieth century, nurses had the strengths they needed but lacked accreditation, licensing, and unifying organizations, which meant they had no single platform from which to lead (ANA, n.d.). They built those structures deliberately, over time.
By 2011, the Institute of Medicine was no longer asking whether nurses belonged in redesigning healthcare. The Future of Nursing report stated plainly that nurses should be "full partners, with physicians and other health care professionals, in redesigning health care in the United States" (IOM, 2011, p. 2). Fifteen years later, the American Organization for Nursing Leadership has formalized a competency framework that moves from supervisor to nurse manager, director, CNO, and CNE, supported by fellowships, certification pathways, and finance training (AONL, 2026). Nursing leadership is not a vague aspiration in human healthcare. It is an established ladder.
Veterinary nursing has followed a surprisingly similar path on a compressed timeline. As Zahara Yee and I (2024) documented in our comparative history, veterinary nursing spent decades fighting for educational standards, credentialing, accreditation, specialization, and professional recognition. NAVTA's Veterinary Nurse Initiative pages make clear the profession still sees important work ahead: standardizing credentials nationally, defining scope of practice, creating title protection, and expanding career pathways. That is not the language of an auxiliary role. It's the language of a profession still trying to finish building itself (NAVTA, n.d.-a; Thomas and Yee, 2024).
And this is not a small workforce asking for symbolic recognition. There are roughly 110,000 credentialed veterinary technicians and technologists in the United States, 172 veterinary technology programs, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects about 14,300 job openings per year through 2034 (Thomas and Yee, 2024; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, n.d.). NAVTA currently lists 16 recognized specialty academies spanning emergency and critical care, anesthesia, behavior, dentistry, oncology, surgery, internal medicine, and more (NAVTA, n.d.-b). This workforce is too central to veterinary medicine to remain structurally peripheral in leadership design.
The gap isn't a talent gap. It's a design gap.
Veterinary technicians are not adjacent to patient care. They provide nursing care and emergency first aid, administer anesthesia, prepare animals and instruments for surgery, collect histories, perform laboratory testing, take radiographs, administer medications, and monitor patients in environments that are often physically and emotionally demanding (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, n.d.). These are not peripheral responsibilities. They are core clinical and operational functions.
Which is why the leadership gap matters so much. The question is not whether every credentialed technician wants to become an executive. Most do not. The question is whether the profession has built somewhere for those of us who do want that path, and who have the education, experience, and judgment to pursue it.
In human healthcare, the answer is yes. In veterinary medicine, the answer is still mostly no.
What we have today are fragments of a ladder. Lead technicians. Supervisors. Veterinary Nursing Managers. Occasionally a Technician or Veterinary Nursing director. We have NAVTA leadership programming. We have specialty pathways and more technicians pursuing business and leadership education than most people realize. But we do not have, in any standardized or widely replicated way, the equivalent of the nurse manager to director to CNO progression that AONL now treats as a normal developmental trajectory.
Something I witnessed recently made this concrete for me.
Over the weekend, while I was away at a conference, I was watching a LinkedIn discussion unfold on a post about production pay and speaker legitimacy. It did not stay on compensation for long. Very quickly it became an argument about who should lead the profession and whose experience counts.
One commenter objected to the idea that non-DVM perspectives be "equitably considered." Another argued that practicing veterinarians are the ones who should "LEAD the conversations that will move the profession forward." A third described a colleague's credentials as "structurally less than those of a DVM." Others pushed back, noting that part-time work does not make someone's experience less valuable and that the best solutions come when all stakeholders are equitably heard.
The details of that disagreement matter less than the logic underneath it. Inclusion, perhaps. Equal authority, no.
That is a familiar pattern for veterinary technicians. We are told our work is essential to quality care, retention, workflow, culture, and utilization. But when the conversation turns to authority, budgets, governance, or executive leadership, the tone shifts. Our labor is strategic, but our perspective, that is supplementary.
Here is what that pattern actually costs.
When credentialed technicians with advanced clinical experience, VTS credentials, business acumen, teaching ability, and leadership capacity see no real pathway beyond floor-level roles, the profession teaches them that growth means leaving, not leading. That has retention consequences. It has utilization consequences. Teams are better utilized when the people who understand nursing workflow, delegation, anesthesia, inpatient care, training, and continuity are involved in designing those systems. And it has cultural consequences, because ceilings are not abstract. People can feel them (NAVTA, n.d.-a; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, n.d.).
The DVM is the terminal clinical degree. It is not the only relevant expertise in every room where the profession's future is being designed. And that distinction matters more than veterinary medicine has been willing to admit.
This is not an argument about clinical authority. Veterinarians hold the legal scope to diagnose, prescribe, perform surgery, and make euthanasia decisions. That is protected by the law, and it should be. I don't see anyone disputing that. But in human medicine, nurses lead medicine too. Not instead of physicians, but alongside them. CNOs shape how care is delivered, how quality is measured, how patients move through the system, and how clinical teams are built and supported. The IOM did not say nurses should be consulted on redesigning healthcare. It said full partners.
The problem in veterinary medicine is not that veterinarians have clinical authority. The problem is that clinical authority has been expanded into a generalized authority over every strategic conversation inside veterinary organizations, including ones that have nothing to do with diagnosis, prescribing, or surgery. Staffing models, onboarding architecture, training systems, retention strategy, and workplace culture are not protected veterinary acts. They are organizational functions. And there is no legal or operational reason why credentialed veterinary nursing leaders should not hold authority over them.
We did not get here because the law required it. We got here because the profession never questioned it.
What human healthcare understands that veterinary medicine still resists saying out loud:
When one of your largest workforce groups is central to care delivery, patient outcomes, quality, safety, continuity, education, and culture, excluding that group from executive design choices is not efficiency. It is a blind spot (AONL, 2026).
AONL's competency model now explicitly links career development, professional identity, business skills, systems thinking, communication, and change management to progressively broader nursing authority. Veterinary medicine has built pieces of an analogous infrastructure, but it has not yet connected them into a coherent executive pathway.
Notably, NAVTA's 2025 leadership summit included a session explicitly titled "Importance of Credentialed Technicians and Public Members on Veterinary State Boards," making the case that their inclusion strengthens transparency, accountability, public trust, and governance (NAVTA, 2025). If we believe credentialed technicians strengthen state boards, why would we assume they do not strengthen executive teams?
What organizations can do now
This does not require every practice to invent a C-suite role tomorrow. What it does though is require organizations to stop treating leadership as a happy accident and start designing it as infrastructure.
Create named veterinary nursing leadership roles with real authority. Multi-site groups, training hospitals, and larger specialty systems can start with titles like Director of Veterinary Nursing, Director of Patient Care Services, or Chief Veterinary Nursing Officer (why again are there only two?). The critical point is not the title. It is authority over workforce design, education, standards, quality, utilization, and budgeted strategic priorities.
Build a developmental ladder instead of isolated jobs. The move from floor technician to executive does not have to be a leap. It can be a progression from lead technician and preceptor, to supervisor, to manager, to director, to regional leader, to executive, with each step adding competencies in finance, change management, people leadership, and strategy.
Fund the pipeline. Tuition support, protected project time, stretch assignments, mentorship, and access to education in business, operations, and quality are not perks. A profession that already expects credentialing, CE, and clinical specialization should not treat leadership education as unusual.
Seat credentialed technicians in governance and strategy rooms now. Hire Veterinary Technicians to sit on committees, compensation task forces, staffing redesign groups, education councils, and advisory boards all of which would benefit from technician leadership. NAVTA made this argument for state boards, the same logic applies inside veterinary organizations (IOM, 2011; NAVTA, 2025).
Tie authority to measurable outcomes. Technician retention, internal promotion rates, onboarding quality, training completion, and patient-flow metrics can and should all be tracked. Leadership pathways should be evaluated like any other strategic investment.
The question is not whether qualified veterinary nursing leaders exist.
They do. We already have the workforce. We already have the specialization. We already have the credentialing. We already have leadership education beginning to emerge (AAVSB, n.d.; NAVTA, n.d.-a, n.d.-b, 2025; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, n.d.).
The question is whether the profession is willing to create places for them to actually lead. Because right now, what often happens is a credentialed technician moves into an operational role, and the clinical perspective that makes them uniquely qualified gets managed down. You're welcome in the room. Your background is listed in your bio. But when you open your mouth about nursing workflow, utilization, or care delivery, someone reminds you, directly or not, that your job is operations now, so best to stay in your lane.
That, my friends, is not a leadership pathway. That is a ceiling disguised with better lighting.
If we keep saying that technicians are essential to every workforce solution while reserving the design of those solutions almost entirely for everyone except veterinary technicians, we should not be surprised when team utilization lags, retention suffers, and the leadership pipeline runs dry.
We built a profession. Now it's time we build its future.
References
American Association of Veterinary State Boards. (n.d.). Veterinary Technician National Exam. https://www.aavsb.org/students-exams/veterinary-technician-national-exam/
American Nurses Association. (n.d.). History of Nursing. https://www.nursingworld.org/ana/about-ana/history/
American Organization for Nursing Leadership. (2026). AONL nurse leader core competencies. https://www.aonl.org/resources/nurse-leader-competencies
Institute of Medicine. (2011). The future of nursing: Leading change, advancing health. National Academies Press. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24983041/
National Association of Veterinary Technicians in America. (n.d.-a). VNI Practice and Standards Committee. https://navta.net/volunteer-opportunities/vni-committee/
National Association of Veterinary Technicians in America. (n.d.-b). Veterinary technician specialties. https://navta.net/veterinary-technician-specialties/
National Association of Veterinary Technicians in America. (2025). Leadership summits and symposia. https://navta.net/leadership-summits-and-symposia/
Thomas, S., & Yee, Z. (2024, November/December). Human Nursing and Veterinary Nursing Professions: A comparative history. The NAVTA Journal. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GAwb-cC7yWH0hCtmDuo8TDTuM-lGf2rq/view
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (n.d.). Veterinary Technologists and Technicians. Occupational Outlook Handbook. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/veterinary-technologists-and-technicians.htm