Why It’s Important to Advance Your Nursing Career

When you have achieved your initial nursing qualifications, such as your RN or your BSN, you might assume that there is no more official learning to do. Of course, there will be more things to understand and more knowledge to gain, but these are things you can find as you work and going back to any kind of classroom situation is unnecessary. Your studying days are behind you, and it is time to get down to the real business of working and nursing.

The fact is this can be exactly right for some people. Some will be happy not to go back to formal training, and they will just want to work as well as possible in their position as a nurse, helping as many patients as possible. Is that you? If so, that is wonderful. However, if it is not and you feel there is more you can do, what can you do to move forward? How can you get more qualifications and continue to work? Perhaps another question should be, why is this so important? Read on to find out more and to get the answers to these questions to help you determine whether these next steps are the right ones for you.

Better Self-Esteem

When you are a nurse, you need to be as confident as possible in what you can do and your knowledge of medicine, specifically how nurses can help people. You must not hesitate – you must be sure of what you are doing, especially as you might be in a life-or-death situation. Being a nurse comes with a lot of responsibility, and as you gain more knowledge and experience, you’ll become more and more confident, and your levels of self-esteem will rise. When this happens, you will be able to help patients much better, and you will even be able to encourage fellow nurses.

Although it is possible to gain some of this knowledge and experience while working, the best and quickest way to enhance your self-esteem is to move forward with your nursing career. Remember that you will not be promoted unless you have the qualifications to show, and you will only be awarded that promotion if you can show how confident you are and how much expertise you have. In other words, moving ahead to become something like a family nurse practitioner will give you confidence and help you be a better nurse, and studying to move forward will do the same. You cannot go wrong regarding how confident you can become and how much experience you can gain when you decide to take on additional studies.

Keep Up to Date

One of the most exciting things about nursing – and medicine in general – is that it is constantly changing. What was the right thing to do not so long ago will become out of date, and a new idea will come in and take its place. This new idea will be one that will benefit patients the most, and nurses need to be able to understand these changes and implement them quickly and effectively.

Although this is a good thing, and it’s what makes nursing such a great career to be a part of – or rather, it’s one of the things – it can also be difficult. Things change so quickly that staying up to date as a nurse is not always easy.

Thankfully, by pushing forward with your career and returning to your studies, you can ensure you are as up to date as possible. When you are studying, you will learn about the newest changes immediately, and as well as this, you will learn how to make them part of your nursing life. If you are a manager, you will see how you can also teach your team about the crucial new ideas. By striving to become a better-qualified nurse and advance your nursing career, you will easily come across this additional benefit that will help your patients more and give you additional knowledge.

Stay Motivated

Nursing is not an easy career to work in; it is tiring, can be emotionally and physically draining, and there is a lot to learn. It is certainly not something that everyone can do. When there is so much going on, trying to learn new things and ensure you are up to date, or even just get through your shift without coming up against too many difficult challenges, can seem impossible, and that can feel highly demotivating. You might feel you cannot get any further and that you are stuck. For an ambitious person, that is a bad place to find yourself in.

When you take steps actually to do something about your career, however, and apply for a promotion or, ideally, go back to school (either physically or an online college, the latter of which is an excellent idea if you don’t want to disrupt your working life) to learn more skills and gain additional qualifications, you’ll feel a lot more motivated. You will see that you are moving forward, even if the progression is sometimes slow. Without this, you will be working hard, but you might worry that you are not getting anywhere; you might even think all that hard work is pointless. Your motivation will certainly grow when there is a real goal to reach. Your goal could be to get your Master of Science in Nursing. If that’s the case, check out this program.

Discover New Opportunities

The more qualified you become as a nurse, the more opportunities you will be able to see and take advantage of. When you are taking steps to advance your career, and you can see that you are progressing, you will also have a lot more choices; you will be able to dictate exactly where you want to go and how you intend to get there. Without career progression, your choices will be severely limited, and you may become frustrated with the way your career is going.

The more you can learn, the more choice you’ll have, and the more opportunities will open up to you. That is not to say that you will want to try everything you have the chance to do or that you will be interested in every nursing pathway, but it does mean that you can pick and choose what works for you, and you will never have to do anything that doesn’t appeal. In this way, you will enjoy your nursing career and a lot more and stick with it for the long term, rather than finding it not to be what you wanted and leaving, which would be a shame not just because there is a nursing shortage, but because nursing can be such a rewarding career when you work towards progression in the right way.

Better Patient Care

For most people, choosing to be a nurse is mainly about patient care. The main reason behind choosing this particular profession was to get the chance to help as many people as possible. If you stop to think about it for a moment, you will probably find that you have been instrumental in improving many patients’ lives. Even if those changes were so small, you did not think about it at the time. It’s amazing what a kind word or advice can do to make things better for someone else. Plus, of course, you will be in life-or-death situations where you can help bring people back to life – the ultimate positive change.

If you truly are interested in helping people, as you probably are if you are a nurse, you will want to advance your career as much as possible. The more qualifications and knowledge you have, the more people you can help. So studying and advancing as a nurse benefits you in terms of your career and helps every single patient you come into contact with, ensuring you know just how to help them and what to say and do to make a difference.

More Support

You will need as much support as you can find when you are a nurse. This post has already mentioned how exhausting and challenging nursing can be, and the biggest issue with this is that it can easily lead to burnout. This will be from a combination of stressful work, long shifts, and difficulty processing things daily. However, although it is relatively common for nurses to experience burnout, or at least start to go down the road towards it, with a good support network in place, it is possible to turn things around and stay healthy and happy in your career. A good support network means you will always have somewhere to turn when you need advice or just someone to talk to, and this alone can make a huge difference in what happens next.

As you advance your career, you’ll find you have a lot of support from many different areas. You will have the people you are currently working with, of course, but you will also meet many new people, whether colleagues or tutors, which will expand your support network. Even if you take an online course, you will still have the opportunity to connect with classmates in many cases.

By studying and moving forward in your career, you will find much more support, but as a bonus, you will also be in a position to offer support to other people. You can become a leader and impart knowledge and advice to those who need it.

Develop New Skills

Although you might assume this will be the case when you choose to advance your career, it is still worth discussing because it is that important. The fact is that as you become more and more qualified and experienced in nursing, you’ll develop a lot of new skills.

We’ve mentioned how important it is to stay as up to date as possible with innovations within nursing and medicine. Still, it is also important to develop as many new skills as possible, as this will also help you and your patients. On top of this, you will gain more confidence, and as we already discussed, this will make you a better nurse who is happy in their role and what role that might happen to be.

It stands to reason that the more you advance your career, the newer skills you’ll pick up, and that means all the good things about nursing progression will come to you much more easily.

It is Fun

Everyone needs to have a work-life balance, and working too much will not help with that. You will need to ensure you have fun in your life as well. Although some people might not equate studying with fun, if you love nursing and enjoy learning new things, it could be that taking on the additional study needed to advance your career is exactly the right route to take to have a good work-life balance.

As well as enjoying the studying aspect, the many choices you will have about where your career is going and what you want to specialize in will be fun.

When there is no fun in your life, you can easily become depressed, stressed, and demotivated. So, the more fun you can inject into your life, the better it will be. Everyone is different, and if that fun happens to come in the form of advancing your career and making the most of the opportunities you have in life, that is wonderful. Do what you need to do to be happy, and if that means moving forward as a nurse and doing more, then that is what you will need to do.

You Can Reflect

Strange as it might seem, moving forward with your career is the ideal time to look back and reflect on what you have done. Although spending too much time in the past doing this is not a good thing as you will miss out on all the new things you can do, it is sometimes useful as it will give you some insight into what you can do next and how far you have come. You can see how well you have done and be inspired to do even more.