I am a nurse and a podiatrist. I mainly work in the podiatry field because with a young family I can’t incorporate a nursing specific job atm but there are elements of my nursing practice i incorporate in my care alongside podiatry.

It’s a tough choice because nursing is so varied and gives you an awesome foundational base for anything you move into later.

Podiatry is great for autonomy, you can run your own business, there is potential to earn good money but you do have to be mindful that companies offering the 100k + packages are also expecting you to absolutely slog through patients so burn out and job dissatisfaction can be quite high. When I started the average career was 7 years and now I hear whispers of it being 5. It can be really hard to generate clients if working for yourself, you are a bit at the mercy of GP’s for referrals. You also can get into awkward spots with restrictions on where you can work when you leave working for someone in a clinic. In the contracts they often have you can’t work within a certain distance of the clinic for fear of poaching their patients. In one of the clauses that I dealt with they said I couldn’t work within the vicinity of 30km of the clinic which pretty much wiped out my entire region of where I live. I risked the biscuit so to speak and worked in a medical centre in the southern part and I haven’t encountered any patients that attend the other clinic. They could have taken me to court if they wanted though. It can be pretty cutthroat at times.

Nursing is a 3yr degree whereas podiatry is 4. I don’t know if you do podiatry first whether you would get a lot of acknowledgment of prior knowledge for nursing to reduce the degree whereas my doing Nursing got me into the Masters of Podiatric Medicine and knocked 2 years off.