If you are looking for a career with a future, have you considered going into nursing? This is one career you will not only find rewarding but will also offer almost endless possibilities now and in the future. With a growing number of people needing healthcare services and an extreme shortage of trained professionals, nursing is one career in which you can almost always be assured of finding a job that suits you.
Photo by YJ-Lee
If you haven’t considered nursing, here are the top 10 reasons why you might want to entertain the possibility of finding a good nursing school.
1. Nursing Jobs Are in High Demand
By this point in time, everyone knows that healthcare is in crisis. A good part of the reason is the high cost of becoming a doctor and so there is a shortage of MDs and DOs across the board. Nurses have taken on ever greater roles in healthcare, and in many instances, are becoming Nurse Practitioners to fill the void where there just aren’t enough doctors to go around. You can find out more about nurse practitioner programs here, however, even with a growing number of NPs, there is still a severe shortage and so nurses remain in high demand.
2. Flexible Working Conditions
One of the major reasons why so many nurses enter the field is because of the flexibility a job like this offers. You can work literally any shift at all hours of the day, so if you have a family at home, you can choose shifts that enable you to be at home when the kids are there. You can work 3 long days a week or a regular 5-day 40-hour week or you can work part time if that suits you better. With such an extreme shortage, most hospitals and clinics will work around your schedule because they need you! While you can’t change your hours regularly to suit your schedule, you probably can get hired on around your availability.
3. Growth within the Profession
As mentioned above, many nurses are starting as RNs and working their way up to becoming a Nurse Practitioner. Some nurses decide to study a specialty such as geriatrics or oncology, while others decide to become a surgical assistant or pediatric nurse. There is much room for growth within the profession which leaves the door continually open for advancement.
Some nurses are natural leaders and can work successfully with their colleagues to achieve a positive result. If you are a BSN educated nurse, you are likely to be considered a nurse administrator or a nurse supervisor. However, there is still room for advancement into management. For example, you can choose the Wilkes University direct entry MSN and grow your professional skill set. Pursuing a Master’s in Nursing gives you a path to a Ph.D., which in turn can lead to even more advanced spots or careers in research.
4. Excellent Opportunities for Travel
If you think that the United States is the only country experiencing such a severe shortage in medical professionals, maybe you’d like to pay a visit to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) website. Within the coming decades, it is projected that the worldwide shortage of medical professionals, of which nurses is a big percentage, will reach almost 13 million. Imagine for just a moment how much suffering there is in developing (third-world) nations with an even smaller budget than we have here at home! If you are looking for a job you can take to literally any country on any continent, it would be nursing.
5. Opportunities in Positions of Leadership
The higher your degree, the greater your opportunities will be to assume positions of leadership. As an RN, you could become a head nurse or a floor superintendent. From there, many RNs have advanced their degrees with specializations in business administration and have become hospital administrators. Some nurses move up the ranks to be the Chief Nurse Administrator and others decide to branch out to open their own clinics with a complete staff working for them. Once you have that initial degree and get a feeling for where you would excel, the sky is virtually the limit, by no stretch of the imagination.
6. Stepping Stone to Higher Level Degrees
Speaking of advancing, nursing is often used as a stepping stone to higher degrees. While you may enter the field with an ADN (Associate’s Degree in Nursing) at the end of a two-year course of study, you may want to continue on another two years to achieve a Bachelor’s Degree. Beyond that you can go for an MSN (Master of Science in Nursing) or even a doctorate degree, entitling you to do just about anything a medical doctor can do in most states. Typically, you will be under the auspices of an MD or DO, but for the most part and in most states, a DNP (Doctor of Nursing Practice) can be fairly autonomous. Some DNPs take a more business oriented track to become administrators, but the whole path began with that initial ADN.
7. Continual Need for Nurses – Job Stability
There will be a continual need for nurses, so job stability is almost guaranteed. While you will need to follow best practices in nursing, sign contractual agreements with providers and simply do your job, little else can keep you from employment. This is one career with better-than-average future prospects and one in which you will probably never need to worry about another Great Recession. No matter how poor the economy gets, there will always be sick people in need of care. Your job will almost always be waiting. Even throughout the last recession, the only complaint was that hours were cut, but if you do the research, you will see that they were not cut by much. The need is too great.
8. Higher Than Average Pay
When you compare pay rates, the one thing you should look at is comparable cost of an education and length of study. Let’s compare a teacher’s salary with that of an RN. Both are 4-year degrees if the teacher is employed K -12. Obviously, college and university instructors will need to hold a master’s or doctorate. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in their latest national survey of 2016, the median salary for an RN is $68,450 while the median salary for a teacher is $55,490. That’s a difference of just under $13,000 a year, or to put it another way, RNs make over 20% more than teachers when comparing median salaries in two fields that require a bachelor’s degree. That’s a sizeable difference and the gap will widen as the shortage requires better benefits to attract professionals to the field!
9. Positions Available in All Sectors
Here is one of the best reasons to consider a career in nursing. Some professions limit you to finding jobs in one sector or another, but rarely will you find a career that has openings in the private, public and government sectors all the time. You can work in the military or you can work at your local doctor’s office. You can be a school nurse, a nurse at the public health clinic or you can work in the corporate world. Many large corporations employ one or more full-time nurses because they staff hundreds, if not thousands, of workers on any given shift. You can work private duty in home healthcare, in nursing homes or you can work with local law enforcement agencies that handle rape cases. There is not a sector in which nursing isn’t an employable occupation.
10. Infinitely Rewarding Sense of Accomplishment
In the end, nursing as a career offers an infinitely rewarding sense of accomplishment. Whether you advance your career with higher education or decide that patient care is where you want to stay, you are often the only face a patient and their family ever sees. You are there in the darkest moments and in those times of great joy as when a child is born, or a patient is pronounced cancer-free.
There is nothing quite as rewarding as knowing you are such a large part of someone’s life and that today, you made a difference. Of all the reasons to pursue nursing, this is the most noble and the one reason we have so many great nurses – however, we need more. Won’t you consider a career in nursing?
