What did your parents do for a living? How about your grandparents? No matter what it was, the likelihood is that they did it from the time they started work until they retired; perhaps they’re still doing it now. This is because older generations tended to stick to one career, seeing it through from beginning to end. They might even have stayed with the same company or in the same workplace for their entire working lives.
Things are rather different today, and younger people coming into the workplace tend to change their jobs every three to five years. They might even change their careers. The ‘job for life’ is not as easily attainable anymore, and those in the workforce have to expand their searches, perhaps even obtain additional qualifications, work up the career ladder, earn more money, and find job satisfaction.
If you’re tired of this kind of working life and you want to find a more stable career to go into, one that you really can stay in from start to finish, nursing could be the ideal choice for you. This is certainly the kind of career that you can go into as soon as you finish high school (although you will need to attend specialist nursing colleges or take specific nursing courses; the days of simply walking into a hospital and learning entirely on the job are long gone) and stay in until you choose to retire, but it’s equally the kind of career that someone could go into later in life.
Again, you will need the relevant qualifications, but once you have them, you can work as a nurse helping as many people as you can on a daily basis. You can even progress once you have qualified as a nurse, taking online BSN to DNP programs. Read on to find out more about why you should change your career to become a nurse, and you might just realize it’s exactly what you need to do.
Career Progression
Are you stuck in your current job? Have you been doing the same thing for years, without any hope of a promotion or a pay rise? If you go into nursing, promotions are something you can achieve regularly. As long as you take on the extra study required, such as online BSN to DNP programs, you can work your way up the career ladder, gaining more responsibility, more money, and more job satisfaction as you go.
The great thing about nursing is that if you put in the hard work, you’ll be rewarded. Experience and knowledge will combine to help you achieve exactly the position you want, and once you reach a level you’re comfortable with, you can stay there, continuing your good work. It might be that you don’t want to gain any kind of promotion at all, and again, that’s not a problem; if you want to start and end your nursing career in one place, that’s exactly what you can do. The choice is always going to be yours, and you can do what makes you happiest while also caring for patients and making a difference in their lives.
Nursing is Something Everyone Can Do
Simply put, nursing is open to every person who might want to work hard to achieve their nursing qualifications. There are no limits on age, background, education, and the only requirements will be that you obtain your nursing qualifications. Other than that, anyone who wants to become a nurse can certainly do so without any problems. If you’re particularly excited to get started (and you have the money), you can even join fast track nursing programs that will have you working in your chosen profession in just a few months rather than years.
Moreover, gender is not a question of matter anymore once it comes to nursing careers. The nursing industry needs more people who are passionate about helping people and caring for others regardless of their gender. This profession exceeds gender-stereotypical beliefs, it is all about how much care one can put into their profession. Therefore, we can see more and more male nurses taking over nursing positions. Though there are lots of pros and cons of being a male nurse, this is a profession worth trying if you have all the personal traits that being a nurse requires. It is an extremely important and sometimes a hard profession that requires lots of passion for caregiving.
However, something that should be mentioned and that is important to note for those who are looking at becoming nurses is that although anyone can become a nurse, it’s not the right career for everyone to take on. You need to be caring and compassionate and have a real love of people and wanting to make them better. You need to be a good communicator and able to work in a team and by yourself. If you don’t have the personal traits that make a good nurse, you might want to consider a different career since you won’t enjoy what you’re doing, and the patients won’t benefit much either.
When you’re choosing whether or not to start nurse training, some of the things to consider would be:
- You’ll need to get used to shift work
- You’ll be working hard both physically and mentally
- Nursing can take an emotional toll
- You should always be learning; this might include studying online BSN to DNP programs, or perhaps learning on the job and being willing to admit when you don’t know something
- You can enjoy career progression through online BSN to DNP programs
So Much Choice
Once you start investigating just what nursing is really all about, you’ll see that there are many more types of nurse and many more branches of nursing than you might have initially thought.
Most people will think of a nurse in a hospital when they consider what it takes to become a nurse, but once you have your specialist degree, and particularly when you obtain additional qualifications later on such as those from online BSN to DNP programs, there are all kinds of different career paths you can choose, and that’s exciting. It makes becoming a nurse much more interesting and accessible to many who might have considered working in a hospital.
Working in prisons, in schools, even visiting people in their homes, or working at your own home is possible when you’re a nurse.
If you do like the idea of working in a hospital, you will still have a lot of choice. Think of all the different departments in a hospital, and you’ll suddenly realize that each of those departments needs dedicated, hard-working nurses, and each of those dedicated, hard-working nurses will need to have specialist knowledge of the department they are working in. The ER is entirely different from the maternity department, which again is different to elderly care, and so on. No matter what conditions or people you want to work with, there will be a department in the hospital catering to it.
Access to Training
Training is essential when you are a nurse. Once, it used to be possible to decide to go into nursing and apply for a job and be trained while doing that job. Older, more experienced nurses would take on that training role. Today things are different; nursing is such a wide-ranging role, and those older, more experienced nurses are so busy with their own jobs that although some training is done with patients, much of it, at least, to begin with, is done at a school that specializes in training nurses.
Again, this used to be an issue. If you didn’t live near to one of these schools and you wanted to change your career to be a nurse, it would have been a difficult move to make; you would either have had to quit your current job to study, or you would have had to give up on your dreams of nursing. Both of these options could be problematic. Plus, you might not live close to a nursing school, thus giving you a long commute, or, once again, taking the possibility of becoming a nurse away from you altogether.
Today, thanks to technology and a more modern way of working, access to the training that is required to become a nurse is much easier. You can attend an online nursing school, which means it doesn’t matter if your closest school is still many miles away or if the school that has the best reputation is in a completely different state. Plus, online learning means that you can work at your own pace, fitting your studies in with your current work and family commitments. You might lose your spare time to your nursing studies, but you’ll still be able to work and bring money in while you’re studying, and that is crucial to many who are changing careers.
Even when you are a qualified nurse and you want to keep learning and gain more qualifications, you can looks at online BSN to DNP programs and much more, giving you so many more opportunities than you might have ever had in the past. If you want to switch careers and become a nurse, there are many avenues open to you.
It’s a Calling
Sometimes life just happens, and we end up stuck in a career that we don’t like. Falling into a job after school or college to make some money while you’re looking for a job that you actually want to do is something that happens to a great many people, but while some are able to change careers early on and do what they had planned to do, others get caught up in that job because they need to make a certain amount of money, or because it’s convenient when it comes to commuting times, or because it turns out they’re good at it, or for all kinds of different reasons. You might even find that a job you took on a temporary basis is exactly the job you want to stay in because you enjoy it.
If, however, you took on a job like this when you had always wanted to be a nurse, you’ll never be quite satisfied. The idea that you could be helping people, possibly even saving lives, is one that will always be with you. This is because, for some, nursing is ‘a calling’. It’s something that they have always wanted to do and will always want to do for the rest of their lives.
If this is you, it’s time to change whatever you are doing now so you can get into nursing. If you don’t, you will be miserable and never reach your full potential. Don’t forget, nursing is a career you can stay in for life, especially since there are online BSN to DNP programs and similar that will help you grow in your career. We work for such a large proportion of our lives that whatever you’re doing as a job has to be something that you love and that you want to do. Otherwise, not only will you be unhappy at work, but you will be unhappy in other areas of your life too.
You’ll Have Plenty of Support
Changing your career at any stage of your life can be a daunting idea, and it might even put you off doing it altogether because you’re comfortable doing what you’re doing, even though you know it’s not what you would really want to do. Getting too comfortable in life isn’t always a terrible thing, but it can be when it prevents you from being the person you really need to be.
When nursing, whether you are starting from scratch or you left nursing, and now, after studying for online BSN to DNP programs, you have come back, older and wiser, you will find plenty of support. You will find that there is always someone there to talk to and to discuss things with, whether that’s a medical problem, a personal challenge, or anything else. Nursing is a tight-knit community and one that sticks together. If you want to become a nurse after working in a different area for a while, you’ll certainly find that there is plenty of help, advice, and support waiting for you when you start and throughout.
It’s this kind of support that you might feel is lacking in your current position. You might also feel that you’re not making a real difference and that it wouldn’t matter if you weren’t there. Perhaps you feel as though you are wasting your caring nature and compassion because it’s just not needed in the job you’re doing right now. These, and many other reasons, could mean that changing careers to nursing is exactly the right thing for you to do. Make sure you research the idea thoroughly, and you could start your journey to nursing as soon as possible.