Being part of a highly respected profession and helping people every day are the main reasons why so many people decide to enter nursing. It requires dedication, compassion, and resilience, so the salary you receive as a registered nurse is unlikely to be the main driver.
That’s not to say all your hard work won’t pay off. Nurses now have more opportunities than ever before to advance to more senior positions. That includes a chance to rise through the ranks of the profession to become the nursing leaders, educators, researchers, and policymakers who are shaping healthcare state-wide, nationally, and even internationally.
There are considerable financial rewards to be gained when you choose to advance your nursing career. You can also increase your involvement in decision-making and clinical practice, which can lead to greater job satisfaction.
Another motivator for moving up the ranks is that more senior, advanced nursing personnel are highly in demand and vital to modern healthcare delivery. This means achieving promotion can present opportunities to be more in control of your workday. This could include, for example, a senior nursing professional having set hours instead of disruptive shifts and flexible hours to fit around family commitments.
These are just some reasons to work towards more advanced roles in nursing. Below, we discuss how to prepare yourself to take the next step up the career ladder.
Experience and involvement
There are some general life and career tips to remember when you want to succeed in both work and daily living and juggle them appropriately. However, as nursing is such a distinct and demanding career, naturally, it requires a focused and strategic approach when you want to secure a promotion. One of these pillars is acquiring as much ‘hands-on’ experience as possible, potentially in various healthcare settings.
Demonstrating your commitment matters greatly in securing a more advanced job with your current employer. This should include your devotion to achieving the best patient outcomes, your interactions with colleagues, your contribution to team dynamics, and your understanding of organizational compliance, processes, and goals.
When applying for new jobs with new employers, make sure you can demonstrate diverse work experience and the skills and knowledge you have gained. Include clinical placements during your study periods and any additional steps you took to improve your practical abilities and insights in your work experience overview.
Tell recruiters what you did and how you intend to put that experience to good use on their behalf. What have you done to ‘go ‘above and beyond’ the expectations of your position, and what are your values as a person and a nurse?
Qualifications for senior nurses
To achieve promotion as a nurse, many of the steps upward rely not just on your work resume but also on the qualifications you have completed.
More advanced nursing positions require a great deal of clinical expertise and proof of other crucial personal and professional skills. Reputable institutions such as Wilkes University offer various online programs to allow working nurses to gain additional credentials. For those who hold a bachelor’s in another field and are looking to transition into a career in nursing, the accelerated nursing practitioner by Wiates University can be a great choice. This program allows students to earn a Bachelor of Science in Nursing in as little as 15 months. Students study nursing principles, behavioral health, and care across the lifespan.
Focus on what niche to aim for
As both proven experience and a degree in nursing create so many opportunities, it’s a good idea to hone in on a particular career path early in the process. What area of nursing best matches your ambitions, as well as your personality, preferences, and interests? For instance, your experience and training could open doors to becoming an advanced nurse practitioner, with a new level of clinical responsibility that some nurses find deeply rewarding.
Showing an extensive understanding of preventative healthcare, diagnosis, and current treatment protocols will get you noticed by recruiters. Those with excellent emotional intelligence are excellent candidates for becoming family nurse practitioners.
Alternatively, your aim may be to progress to become a nurse mentor, preceptor, or educator if that dedication to helping more junior staff will be vital in impressing your future employer or your organization. They will also want evidence of your investment in being an excellent communicator.
Are you leaning more toward pursuing a research, leadership, or policy-making career within nursing? In that case, you will be much more credible to future hires if you show evidence that you have invested effort into keeping up with modern trends and developments in global healthcare.
Network and research
The above point smoothly leads to this practical and essential way to advance the nursing career ladder: networking. They say what you know but who you know that is.
The truth is that to secure a promotion in nursing, what you know is the bedrock of advancement, but you can still build on that by making important connections. It’s not just about securing impressive personal or professional recommendations and references. To grow your skills, knowledge, and insights, you can also learn from others who have advanced in nursing.
This could involve volunteering to shadow senior staff or specialists in your own time. Ask your manager for constant feedback and make the most of formal appraisals to gauge your strengths and any gaps or weaknesses you can work towards addressing.
Also, getting as much information as possible from colleagues in other healthcare roles naturally increases your value as an employee. You have context for your own tasks, duties, and aims as a nurse and the ability to support other staff more comprehensively.
Optimize clinical placements during your nursing studies and, if possible, volunteer for extra experience. Using your mentor or preceptor during your degree program and any future clinical work. Work would be best. Don’t your peers, either. Chatting with them and sharing experiences and insights can help you to gain new perspectives and best practices. You could widen this networking and research by attending conferences, forums, and other healthcare events. You may connect well with someone who tips you off when your ideal job role becomes vacant. At the very least, you can add this endeavor to your resume to prove your dedication to your profession.
Publish and present as a nurse.
One of the best ways to boost your nursing career is to share your practical experience and professional perspective with others.
This could include drafting and submitting articles for healthcare journals, websites, organization publications, and web pages. These articles should be helpful, scrupulously fact-checked, and well within any criteria established by your employee’s common practice in healthcare to pool valuable information as much as possible.” An “act of professional generosity and a shared responsibility could also include volunteering to speak at forums, staff meetings, and other events.
Every one of these opportunities helps you better establish your name and credentials and build your confidence and communication prowess.
Showcasing the desired attitude and personality
Investing time in studying for a nursing degree is not always easy, even when you choose to pursue your training online. You may need to arrange your learning and clinical placements around an existing job and family commitments. It will be worthwhile, however, when you secure a step up in your nursing career with a range of benefits, including a better salary and greater responsibility.
That sort of focus and determination to succeed counts for a lot with future employers in healthcare. The fact that you decided to improve your skills in such an impressive manner is bound to count for a lot.
However, your credentials and work experience may still need something to balance. This is especially true if you apply for more senior nursing positions in competition with candidates with similar qualifications and employment histories. It may come down to what you bring to the position and employer.
Your personality and attitude are closely entwined with your performance and your ability to fit well into a new role and a new team. This is why pre-employment personality assessment tests are becoming commonly used in all employment sectors, including healthcare. They try to predict the candidate’s motivation and self-confidence, which can have a big impact on the strength of their performance.
Finding someone with strong self-assurance makes perfect sense when recruiting for advanced nursing roles, as you need candidates who can make decisions and take action decisively and appropriately.
How you can build soft skills
When it comes to putting your best foot forward with potential recruiters, there are some steps you can take to build your soft skills. MaTheteps outlined will intuitively help you develop your personal and professional skills, but they are not about achieving clinical excellence through study, experience, research, and networking.
For instance, the more you communicate and collaborate with other healthcare professionals, the better you will get at it. The more exposure you have to various patient situations and needs, the more opportunities you gain to expand your emotional intelligence.
Other soft skills — which are sometimes referred to as empowerment skills — you will need moving forward include critical thinking and problem-solving abilities. One way to fine-tune these is to be ready to ask questions and make suggestions as often as possible. Viewing even wrong answers as a valuable learning tool would be best.
Much of this can involve pushing yourself out of your comfort zone as a nurse and acquiring the sorts of soft skills embedded in modern leadership. Whether you are heading up a small clinical team or promoting healthcare policies in your next job, you are expected to have excellent interpersonal skills and the ability to get the best out of others.
Today, there is a huge emphasis on a strong, nurturing organizational culture. As a senior nursing professional, you are responsible for supporting and enhancing that culture. This can be achieved by being a leader” and “sharing information, creating a higher level of trust, and promoting a sense of inclusion and belonging.”
Time to take a step upward in nursing
Remember to thoroughly explore potential job openings in your location and healthcare field. Don’t jump into the first well-paid post you see without spreading your net a bit wider. You could also consider asking for a sabbatical or secondment away from your current role to gain more exposure to the new environment and challenges you are considering. Arranging informal visits to new healthcare organizations may also be a wise move before you apply or go for an interview. You need to demonstrate you are the best fit for this promotion in nursing, but you also need to be confident it matches your aspirations and preferences.
Many of the ways to take a step upward in nursing require a long-term strategy to increase your value to a future health or social care employer and acquire the correct qualifications, experience, and personal attributes to gain an advanced nursing post. But remember, there are always practical things you can do to make career advancement possible.