Turning Nursing Roles into Career Journeys with Purpose

Nursing is obviously personally rewarding work. It’s often less rewarding from a career perspective. You do make reasonably good money as an RN. With enough experience, salary expectations hover in the upper five-figure range, which is obviously nothing to sneeze at.

That said, there are other much easier ways to earn a comparable salary. Similarly, there are many promotions available to the standard RN. You might develop a supervisory role within your floor, but aside from that, career progression is primarily scheduled and gradual. 

You might receive a modest annual salary increase, but it won’t be tied to any particular accomplishment other than sticking around for another year. In this way, a nurse who is entering the workforce today will most likely have a very accurate idea of how much money they can expect to make twenty years from now. This is obviously different from the expectations of someone entering the world of business, where the ceiling is much higher and effort and aptitude are what drive success.

Is there a version of health care where nurses can be rewarded not just through personal fulfillment, but through career development? The answer to that is tricky, but it is possible for nurses to experience more conventional career developments while also doing good work.

How Promotions Happen in Nursing

In the introduction, we mentioned that the primary career development pipeline involves becoming a charge nurse or something similar. There are several ways to advance beyond the typical mold through career development.

Graduate School

One of the clearest pathways to get a better job is to get a master’s degree in health care. Nurses can take this in a lot of different directions. 

If you’re looking for a leadership position, there are programs that combine patient care considerations with administrative ones to produce leadership roles. 

That said, there are other ways to elevate your nursing career without looking at it from a promotion point of view. 

Graduate school is also how you get advanced practice jobs, the most common of which is nurse practitioner.

This is not exactly a promotion that nurses can get, but a different job with better pay and more responsibilities. 

It takes approximately two to three years to receive an advanced practice degree. However, there are direct entry programs that can accelerate that journey, allowing you to get both an undergraduate and graduate degree in five years. 

Or if you have a bachelor’s that isn’t related to health care, you can enter direct entry programs that allow you to get your BSN and MSN in two years. Both are good options for people who want to accelerate their careers as quickly as possible.

A big benefit of specializing through graduate school is that you can shift the focus of your career into categories that interest you the most. For example, if you like working with babies, there are neonatal placements. 

If you like playing a strategic role in general health, you can become an FNP. If mental health is your passion, you can become a psychiatric nurse practitioner. Most RNs will move around a lot and do a little bit of everything. As an advanced practice nurse, you can really zero in on the areas of medicine that you enjoy the most.

Specialized Certification

A quicker route to career acceleration is through specialized certification programs. These involve additional credentialing, but they don’t require graduate school. They also usually won’t require continuing education loans. There will be training, but it’s often paid for by your employer.

For example, if you want to become a forensic nurse, you will often be able to apply for the position as an RN with no specialized credential. 

You’ll then work on getting certified as a forensic nurse while working in the job itself, typically with supervision. The reason for this is that most specialized nursing fields require hundreds of hours of direct experience that you can only get while on the job. Employers understand this and are more than happy to provide opportunities for strong candidates who haven’t yet received their certification.

This route will still take a few years before you’re fully certified, but because you’re actively doing the work and even getting paid for it during that time, it is less disruptive to your everyday work life than graduate school would be. There are many dozens of special certifications.

For that reason, pursuing certifications can be an excellent way to not only increase your compensation (many of these jobs will pay a little better than standard RN placements), but also to renew your passion for the work. No matter how much you love health care, it’s very natural to get burnt out doing the same thing for thirty or forty years. Specialization gives you the chance to mix things up while remaining a nurse.

Many Paths

A lot of people don’t realize how many ways there are to become a nurse. In fact, you can begin your career as an LPN without getting a degree at all. It’s easy to forget that while there is a college degree strongly associated with nursing, the most important part of the qualification is not a bachelor’s degree, but the certification itself. To do nursing at the highest possible level, you will need to be properly credentialed.

Every career trajectory is a little bit different, and there are lots of ways to do this important work. It’s all about finding what path works well for you. The best part is that because there are so many options, you’re not stuck in one place forever. You can always pivot later on.