The nursing profession is a hugely rewarding career path that enables professionals to deliver primary healthcare and cultivate healthy lifestyles in a society or community. That notwithstanding, nurses face many challenges daily that require them to possess excellent competency and the ability to carry out their responsibilities in a pressure-filled sector.
For current nurses or individuals considering a career path in the field, the drive to grow in the profession is often inevitable. There are a lot of benefits to advancing your nursing career, from exploring new job opportunities to increasing job satisfaction and earning potential. Even so, it does not make the process any easier, with some professionals often confused about where to start. Therefore, in this article, we offer some practical strategies to achieve career advancement in nursing.
Why Is A Nursing Career So Important?
The nursing field is not new, and with most old sectors, the area has witnessed some great professionals who rose to the very top. Evidently, it was a lot harder to progress in the field as they had to try different advancement strategies, but thankfully, their efforts have laid the groundwork for today’s nurses to succeed in their careers.
Nurses can develop solid professional skills and recognize specific strategies that will be effective in achieving their career advancement goals. In essence, productivity, efficiency and job satisfaction are the three significant benefits of employing advancement tips.
There is a need for all nursing professionals to boost their careers. However, these nursing tips are most important for individuals who are new to the profession as they mostly have a hard time adjusting.
The demanding nature of the nursing profession calls for numerous specialized skills to perform effectively and under immense pressure. That said, it’s necessary for nurses with limited experience to have the right tools and information required to thrive in the dynamic nursing profession.
Workplace Skills Required Of Competent Nurses
Before advancing your nursing career, professionals must be skilled and competent in their responsibilities. Skills are practical for any professional advancement, and nursing is no exception. Therefore, becoming an exceptional nurse requires much more than the bare minimum requirements.
The following workplace skills qualify a nursing professional for career advancement.
Awareness
Awareness in the context of the nursing profession incorporates cultural and psychological consciousness. A nurse’s responsibilities go beyond the technical competency required for healthcare professionals. Nurses are typically regarded as the primary providers of care, and the most effective way to handle patients is to have good cultural awareness and understanding.
Nurses should treat all patients with the same care and compassion regardless of their orientation, belief, values or culture. Patients’ reactions to different circumstances vary greatly and could be challenging to handle. Therefore, understanding the human psyche behind different actions helps professionals to be proactive and recognize the perfect way to address each patient.
A nursing professional’s cultural and psychological awareness provides the professionalism that a patient needs in any situation.
Attention to Detail
Healthcare delivery can often be a very critical and sensitive process, with minor changes potentially impacting things significantly. A mistake in a clinical setting could determine if a patient lives or dies. Therefore, nurses can only qualify for career advancement if they are competent in paying attention to even minute details.
Attention to detail is a nurse’s ability to efficiently allocate cognitive resources to achieve thoroughness and accuracy when accomplishing tasks, no matter how small or large. Take diagnosis – for example, some patients may downplay a symptom for one reason or another. Nurses should be able to identify problems by closely monitoring the patient.
Problem-Solving
The era when nurses were viewed as assistants to other medical professionals is well behind us. Nursing professionals are fully trained professionals, and as such, being competent in problem-solving can help boost your career in the field. In the medical setting, nurses are required to think critically and react quickly to high-pressure situations.
Obviously, nurses at the top of their profession are healthcare decision makers. However, it takes practice, and even new nurses should be able to contribute to solving problems that may arise throughout their time as new professionals.
Compassion
A nurse’s compassion trickles down to the need to handle a wide range of patients’ emotions. Aside from patients, their immediate family must be considered and interacted with consistently. Compassion for managing patients and their families creates a platform to thrive as a nurse.
Experienced nurses have highlighted the thin line between compassion and abuse, with most nurses subjecting themselves to situations where they feel threatened, all in an attempt to be compassionate. However, nurses must show emotional intelligence in difficult situations.
Self-Care
The nursing profession is one of the most demanding jobs globally. This is evident in the number of nurses who opted for retirement following the COVID-19 pandemic. Nurses are often the first point of contact for patients and are exposed to numerous difficult situations every day. With the high demand for nursing professionals today, it is common for nurses to become stressed and overworked.
Therefore, there is a need to develop a solid support system to handle the challenges and difficulties associated with a career in nursing. Different guides to self-care for nurses have been widely publicized, and nurses can rely on these guides to manage their mental health, stay healthy and enjoy a personal life.
Tips To Advance Your Nursing Career
Nurses in most parts of the world have reported being overlooked or neglected in professional development. Some factors pinpointed as the cause of this neglect include tighter budgets, a struggle for resources, and working under immense pressure.
However, aside from these limitations, nurses’ level of success regarding career progression is often based on their ability to embrace a proactive approach to healthcare. While this may seem intimidating initially, especially for professionals who are new to the industry, here are some tips that could ease the process and boost your nursing career.
Mentorship
Experience is essential in every field, yet throughout nurses’ careers, they are certain to experience some situations that ordinary people in most sectors might not understand. Therefore, nurses must seek guidance from other professionals who have much more experience and competency. Mentorship serves this purpose effectively.
Mentors are individuals who guide a less experienced person by building trust and modeling positive behaviors. Having a mentor offers you insights that are essential for growing professionally. In a sector as dynamic as healthcare, having experienced professionals who are ready to serve as a professional reference and connect you with resources is an invaluable asset.
Choose a Specialization
The nursing field is large, and the only way that professionals can stand out is by opting for a specialization in which they can perform streamlined responsibilities to the best of their abilities. Specialization also presents an opportunity to focus on aspects of your job that you prefer and that you are best at.
Choosing a specialization requires a nurse to become certified in a particular area. This helps advance your career and paycheck. The educational pathway depends on the field, as different specialties require various qualifications, experiences and academic levels. There are numerous nursing specialties to choose from, some of which include:
- Registered nurse (RN)
- Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist (CRNA)
- Cardiac nurse
- Clinical nurse specialist
- Emergency room nurse
- Family nurse practitioner (FNP)
- Geriatric nurse
Explore Continuing Education Opportunities
As with every other aspect of the world, the healthcare industry is constantly developing, and professionals’ success depends on how well they can stay up to date with these developments. In some medical institutions, professionals must engage in further education that incorporates new industry techniques, advancements and practices. However, boosting your nursing career entails much more than the bare minimum.
Unsurprisingly, a high level of healthcare expertise helps professionals stand out in the industry. Nonetheless, the top nursing positions are reserved for professionals who can seamlessly adapt to changes in the industry, such as technological integrations in healthcare services, and who are capable of accepting new challenges. Nurses should invest in professional development around non-clinical areas such as communication, leadership and management.
Explore Educational Advancement
Developing as a nursing professional in non-clinical areas is essential. However, the primary responsibility of a nurse is delivering healthcare. As such, nurses should continually evaluate their educational credentials and identify how they can be improved. This strategy works for existing nurses and individuals seeking to break into the industry.
Several educational advancement paths are available to nurses, from a Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) to a Master of Science in Nursing (MSN) and a Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP). Today, the internet has also brought remote learning to the forefront. Professionals can engage in quality educational programs in an online nursing school like Elmhurst University. Their online degrees offer a lot more flexibility for nurses to study at their pace, while also carrying out their responsibilities in a medical setting.
Networking
An individual’s network can be vital to professional success, with a strong and expansive network providing quality insight into trends as well as insider information on movement within the industry. For medical professionals, being part of professional organizations is essential for networking and securing top job opportunities. There are several professional nursing organizations where professionals can meet other passionate, successful nurses. Some popular nursing organizations include:
- National Student Nurses Association
- American Nurses Association
- National League for Nursing
- National Association of Hispanic Nurses
- International Council of Nurses
- National Black Nurses Association
Interacting with these organizations has proven to be an effective way to inspire young nurses to advance their careers. They are also exposed to some of the latest advancements, techniques and practices in the field. Additionally, nurses in professional organizations are often the first to get invitations to and discounts on healthcare conventions, educational advancements and employment assistance.
Learn From The Experiences Of Others
There is hardly ever a new problem in the nursing field. Most situations have occurred before and have been resolved by other nurses. As such, nurses must identify these scenarios and learn from them. A significant way that nurses can learn from previous accounts is by sifting through different resources such as blogs.
Most processes that start a professional’s career advancement begin with information. You can learn new, groundbreaking ideas from seasoned experts and possibly refine them to suit your practice through nursing resources. Nursing resources help in understanding how the industry works and how to navigate certain circumstances through real-life accounts.
Versatility
Sometimes, we do not know how much we enjoy something until we try it out. This concept also applies to professional life. Professionals are more likely to advance and excel in careers they want. Therefore, being versatile and engaging in different units can help better identify your preferred specialization. Versatility also makes nurses more merchantable in the job market.
Nurses with vast experiences in different medical units are also considered more valuable to medical centers as they can quickly fill various positions. This is especially true now, with understaffing a prevalent issue across the industry. Having diverse experience also makes a nurse primed for management positions.
Volunteering
Different issues and pressures in the healthcare industry present nurses with opportunities for development and progression. These include understaffing and lack of time and funding. In situations such as this, volunteering helps enhance existing skills or develop new ones, while also gaining knowledge and experience that would have been otherwise difficult to acquire.
Volunteering also helps in discovering the best specialization to opt for. Some popular volunteering opportunities available to nurses include ward, mealtime and befriender volunteers.
Clarify Objectives
Professionals can trigger career advancements in different ways. Firstly, some professionals opt for rebooting their nursing careers, especially with the constantly changing and evolving healthcare landscape. However, another effective strategy involves mapping out objectives to ensure that you remain on the right track. To clarify objectives, a professional must ask specific questions about short- and long-term career goals and accomplishments.
By clarifying objectives, professionals can determine the direction to follow to achieve their goals. For example, nursing professionals seeking to become decision makers will streamline their educational paths to incorporate management and leadership competencies.
Develop Workplace Skills
Initially, we highlighted some workplace skills that qualify a nurse for career advancement. These skills are transferable and required in all aspects of nursing, from developing practical communication skills with patients and colleagues to showing compassion and empathy for the plight of patients and their families. All these competencies help a professional to stand out in the industry. Aside from the highlighted workplace skills, there are many others, including:
- Organizational skills
- Teamwork
- Endurance
- Leadership skills
- Multitasking
- Time management
- Decision-making
Employees will always look out for these competencies whenever a nursing professional applies for a top position. Therefore, it’s crucial to have a solid skillset that serves as a driving force in boosting your nursing career.
Benefits Of Advancing Your Nursing Career
The quest to advance your nursing career goes beyond you being an ambitious person. There are numerous benefits to a professional’s personal life and wellbeing. Aside from the obvious reasons – new job opportunities and money – here are some other benefits of boosting your nursing career.
It Gives A Sense Of Purpose
Most people traverse through their professional lives without a sense of purpose, and with time, the frustration becomes visible in their personal lives. Having a sense of purpose goes a long way in improving a person’s physical and mental health and happiness.
In a professional setting, one way to develop purpose is by advancing your career. Career advancements are associated with new, challenging and more exciting responsibilities, which increase an individual’s work productivity. Often, professionals also need to gain added knowledge to contribute more to the organization.
Improves Satisfaction Rate
Career development has been identified as an influential factor in improving job satisfaction. According to a study, employees are more likely and willing to stay in an organization when they are exposed to career advancement opportunities.
In the nursing field, it’s no surprise that nurses often experience burnout and are dissatisfied with their responsibilities. However, different nurses have confessed to finding extra motivation and happiness in more advanced roles.
Increased Engagement And Productivity
Today, nurses are actively encouraged to engage in career advancement development – so much so that some medical institutions invest in development opportunities to prepare nurses for higher organizational roles.
In this case, nurses feel more supported in the workplace, resulting in more engagement and productivity. Every professional would be happy to invest in an industry that supports their development and advancement.
As a nursing professional, the process of career advancement is lengthy and requires dedication, patience, and passion. As such, nurses are advised to enjoy the entire process. They should also learn from previous accounts of other professionals who have gone through the same process. Educational advancements, mentorship and specialization remain some of the most effective strategies for ascending to the top of the nursing profession. If you combine those with a commitment to improve, you are guaranteed a boost in your nursing career.