It has been around a hundred years since the first registration of nurses. Currently, the nursing profession is at a highly pivotal moment where the prospects to build a career and transform to improve patient care have never been better.
There were never so many job opportunities for nurses as you see in the healthcare industry today. With the advancements in technology and improvements in life expectancy, innovations in working style are rapidly shaping the nursing career path.
But how can nurses explore these new alternatives and prepare themselves to step into such roles to upgrade their nursing careers? Following the top five opportunities will give you the creative motivation to move into the next, most advanced nursing role.
Upgrade Your Education
Whether you are working full-time as a nurse or eager to do so sooner or later, taking a closer look at your professional degree credentials can be a helpful way to receive better opportunities and high salaries. It can modify your job prospects, and you can achieve your goals of specializing in a field.
Similarly, getting your BSN degree could be a pivotal move to enhance your employment and progress chances for your nursing career growth. For licensed registered nurses (RNs), you can receive a BSN degree online in a relatively shorter duration through an RN to BNS degree program. Likewise, if you have a BSN degree, you can pursue an MSN degree to learn advanced skills.
However, getting a master’s degree is not mandatory to ensure better career opportunities. There are ample online programs and courses available, including advanced degree programs. The internet has changed the learning experience by offering various online options.
Such courses usually provide an adaptable learning approach, useful when working and pursuing your studies simultaneously.
Don’t forget to explore different free specialist courses available online. These courses will give a complete insight into diverse expertise, skills, and better education opportunities, allowing you to feel an aspect of learning without investing much in training.
When you’re exploring different educational courses, always find out about their credibility and if what they’re offering is entirely recognized by every employer.
Specialize In Areas with High Demand
The nursing industry has dramatically changed in this generation. Every hospital bed is filled with elderly patients suffering from complex health conditions, frailty issues, and multiple long-term ailments.
Patients admitted several days in a hospital for recovery are now easily looked after at their homes, and technology is entirely altering management at clinics. Professionals now carry out what was once a necessary surgical procedure through interventional radiology. All such crucial changes indicate that the nursing profession has had to revise and transform to meet the latest increasing demands.
If you’re planning on upgrading your nursing career, check out different areas where the need is and will be rising in the future. Wound care, for instance, is a sector of extremely high demand but with a shortage of skilled nurse practitioners. Similarly, good discharge planning is also essential with the growing inquiry from the CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services). Will you become that specialist planner?
As for technical developments, artificial intelligence (AI) has already influenced numerous areas of the healthcare sector, but do you know how it could change the way you practice? As more surgical techniques progress, there’s an immense need to train professional nurses in different forms of practicing in their clinical teams. These opportunities indicate a need for nurses to begin specializing where they find high demand.
Subspecialize in A Highly Demanding Area
As a professional nurse, there are diverse opportunities to pursue on your career journey. It is excellent to add another subspecialty to your portfolio as it creates specialist skills. It allows you to go for and get your niche role with a higher salary where expertise is in high demand.
Mental health, pediatrics, oncology, renal, and critical care nursing are some of the best subspecialties where demand exceeds the availability of skilled staff, and there are better opportunities to advance your career. It will upgrade your nursing career as a professional clinical nurse and enables you to use that skill to handle individual and niche departments or to practice in a community applying your expertise. It’ll also be a stepping stone to your clinical study or research.
Another nursing position that is highly demanded is travel nursing. This specialty hit its peak when the nursing field faced a nationwide shortage. Staffing agencies worldwide hire adventurous nurses to take on short-term assignments in different parts of the globe. Travel nurses can work anywhere, from clinics in various states to developing countries, as a part of a medical team. What’s more, travel nursing provides nurses with the unbeatable freedom and flexibility to choose when and where they want to work. Many agencies provide free housing for travel nurses depending on the length of assignments and also what professionals’ preferences are.
Find A Mentor
Upgrading your career in nursing goes much beyond degrees or courses. You’ll have to learn some softer skills related to leadership, improving others, and coping with challenges effectively. The ideal way to ensure that is to get yourself a mentor who will guide you through distinct leadership scenarios, allowing you to build and grow your skills.
Keeping a professional portfolio with a contemplative diary can also help you learn from practice. A few interviews use various scenarios to see the experience of different situations, such as applying for a change in any department. Thus, keeping such records helps you with your job application preparation. And when you accomplish that goal of becoming a senior in your field, you can pay back by mentoring other nurses hoping to upgrade their careers.
Search For the Next Trends
There are unlimited opportunities for professional nurses to develop and innovate their careers. It involves searching for significant new trends and being prepared to step up. Examples include analyzing worldwide shortages of skilled doctors and finding where nurses can handle work once completed, particularly where there are considerable gaps in healthcare services.
Again, technology is a great opportunity where nurse practitioners can offer practical and salient advice and educate others. With the beginning of artificial intelligence (AI) processes, there will be possibilities to foresee diseases and help those patients at risk remain healthy. These roles are great options for nurses to develop, grow, and upgrade their careers.
Conclusion
Being a professional nurse practitioner isn’t for all. However, if you believe that you’re ready and very excited for a lifelong learning experience and feel amazing when you help others, the nursing profession is your true calling. Also, when you do a job that you truly admire, the consistent demand to improve your skills and education shouldn’t be much of a problem.
Advancement in a nursing career is a process that will span your whole career. Even performing one extra job or researching a new opportunity is considered a step towards your nursing future.
