Addendum.

On an economic level, I think what's happening is that some kinds of mildly licensed jobs were always kind of crappy, but you went and did them anyways so you could get higher wages and a guaranteed number of hours a week, which you couldn't always get anymore elsewhere since the advent of the internet and because places like retailers have been hacking up jobs into part-time and forcing people into multiple jobs if you need a certain normal number of hours per week.

Only, now the minimum wage has been rising to almost spitting distance to those jobs while their wages haven't really risen, and with the staffing shortages everywhere the mildly licensed jobs have also really become sucky and the retailers etc. are comparatively less sucky and will finally give you enough hours, so why not check out of the mildly licensed jobs, since you can make around the same amount of money elsewhere, with less work and less stress?

It's like this interim period, where employers haven't caught on and still think they can keep base wages low and instead they burn out the staff they have and pay through the nose for emergency staffing agencies etc. in what they think is only a temporary stop-gap measure that longer-term will be the best decision for their budget, only that day of stabilization and return to normalcy doesn't seem to be coming and they don't seem to be realizing it yet.

In terms of me, when I got my one healthcare license over the winter, I wasn't realizing the omicron wave was changing the employment situation so much, and I was still locked into my way of thinking from the past like 4-5 years, where I had to keep doing what I've been doing in eldercare to ensure sufficient employment hours, when that really isn't the case anymore all of a sudden because of the changed situation in retail.

Like I've been telling people, "It's a pandemic, you have to be willing to change and go with the flow."