NursingHow To Stand Out When You Want To Advance Your Career As A Nurse

The main reason you became a nurse is probably because you wanted to help people. You wanted to care for them and improve their lives, whether that’s through medication and treatment or simply being there for them when they need care. What you might not have considered when you first decided to be a nurse and then began your training was your career progression. After all, you were going to be a nurse, and that was it.

However, the fact is that there are plenty of career progression possibilities for nurses. If you are ambitious and want to do more in your career than you are doing now, there are many options and opportunities to consider. In order to do this and to get the results you want, it’s a good idea to understand how to stand out. There are many nurses who will want similar or the same things as you, and if you’re going to obtain the positions that will boost your career, you do need to be the one who is noticed.

Advancing your nursing career is exciting and opens up entirely new avenues of ideas and directions. It’s an exhilarating thing to look into, but it can also feel somewhat daunting. There is so much choice and so many things you should and could be doing to make your career better and put you where you know you need to be that you might wonder where to start. The best place to start is by making yourself stand out. When you do that, you’ll have plenty of choice, and success will be more likely. With that in mind, here are some of the ways to stand out when you want to advance your career as a nurse.

Find A Mentor

Nursing is a unique career. A nurse will see and do things that the average person will never come across in their lives on an average day. Nurses deal with life and death constantly, and they have to help people who are in the most vulnerable and scary places they’ll ever be.

As well as this stress and worry, nurses also deal with the most wonderful things. People recovering from serious illnesses, someone making it through surgery and waking up. They’ll be there for births and big events.

In other words, nursing is all about extremes, and unless you are a nurse or have nursed in the past, this is not an easy thing to understand. This is exactly why, if you want to stand out in your nursing career and progress to where you want to be, you need to find a mentor who understands. It would help if you found someone you can talk to about things that upset you and things that make you happy. If the person you are talking to has been through the same things, they will have the advice you need to move forward, no matter what has happened.

Many nurses who have reached high levels in their career put it down, at least in part, to having a great mentor. A mentor isn’t just someone to talk to when you’ve had a particularly good or bad day, however. A mentor will be there to guide you to whatever the next steps are in your career. You’ll gain insight from them, and when it comes to your career choices, although the final decision will always be yours, with a mentor on hand you can weigh up the pros and cons of each choice much more easily. This kind of partnership can be invaluable to a nurse, whether they want to progress in their career or not.

To find a mentor, look around where you are working now. Is there anyone who you are naturally drawn to and who already helps you when you need assistance? If so, they might be your mentor without you even knowing it. If not, you can look outside the place where you work – online forums, for example, can offer excellent scope for finding a mentor, and even if you never meet up in real life, the advice you receive digitally can be exactly what you need. As time goes on, you might even become a mentor to someone else, making sure the knowledge and experience you have gained is passed on.

Consider A Specialization

As we’ve said, there is a lot of choice when it comes to nursing and what your next steps might be after you have qualified and gained experience as an RN. Choice is always good, and it’s great not to have to pick something to do just because that’s all there is. However, conversely, it can also be overwhelming when there is a lot of choice; how can you know which option to choose?

A mentor will help, as we’ve mentioned above, but specializing will also allow you to narrow down those many choices into a number you can more easily handle. This is the wonderful thing about nursing; there are so many different types. There are general nurses, and there are nurses who work in the OR or the ER, nurses who work with children or seniors. Nurses who work in cancer wards or with burn patients. If you can think of a condition or reason for someone to be in hospital, there will be a nurse that specializes in that area.

In order to specialize, you need to think about what you enjoy most about nursing and where your natural strengths lie. When you put these things together, you will be able to form a more detailed picture of where you should be in terms of your career. Once you have that, you can look into what qualifications and experience are needed and ensure that you have what is required to move forward.

Follow Nursing Blogs

When you want to stand out in terms of advancing your nursing career, you’ll probably think about all the things you can do in your workplace and with your learning in a practical sense. However, technology has advanced to a point where there are many other ways to learn as well, and following good, informative nursing blogs is an excellent idea.

When you follow these blogs, you’ll gain additional insight into various departments, new ideas about medicine and procedures, and even come to understand how nurses can relax or avoid burnout, among a plethora of other information and advice.

Having this additional knowledge is something that will certainly allow you to stand out for positive reasons, especially when you can utilize it in your career and show potential employers that you have a comprehensive understanding of nursing as a whole, and a good knowledge of your specialism, assuming you have one.

Continue Your Education

The healthcare industry is interesting because it’s always evolving and moving forward. Things we know today wouldn’t have even been imagined just a few years ago. This is why it’s so important to keep learning as much as you can about nursing and healthcare in general. The more you know, the more you’ll stand out. As well as this, you’ll be able to help your patients better.

There are a number of ways to continue your learning, and we’ve mentioned nursing blogs already, which are a great source of information. Other ways include going to conferences, reading nursing and general healthcare magazines, and even watching videos online where healthcare professionals explain new and exciting technologies and techniques.

However, one of the best ways to continue your education is to go back to school. If you want to advance your career, you’ll need additional qualifications in many cases, so applying for college is a necessary step in your professional career. This used to mean having to take time away from the practical side of nursing and potentially even losing some money while doing it. Still, thanks to online learning, it’s now possible to gain more qualifications while working, ensuring that your career stays on track. Click here to find out more about the DNP program, for example, which will propel your nursing career to the next level.

Join A Professional Organization

There are a number of professional nursing organizations that exist for nurses to join in order to gain more knowledge and interact with other people who understand what it means to be a nurse. These organizations can be social, professional, or a mix of both. Networking will become a lot easier, as will finding the ideal mentor, and you’ll feel at home in the company of other people who want the same things as you and who have experienced the highs and lows of what nursing can bring.

Joining one or more of these organizations is also a great thing to add to your resume. It shows you are dedicated and passionate and take your career seriously. You’ll be able to show any potential employer that you want to move forward with your career and that you are enthusiastic about nursing. This is a great way to stand out from the crowd.