Your Guide to Nursing
Careers in Nursing continue to be one of the most popular for students graduating from school, and for good reason. It’s a safe bet that there will always be high demand for entry-level nurses in the field, simply because there are always so many individuals requiring health care of some kind in this country. It’s also well known that the U.S. has an aging population, dominated by the progression of baby boomers to their golden years, and that fact alone points up the need for large numbers of healthcare professionals to help provide medical care for so many people.
Apart from high demand and job security though, there are quite a few other reasons why careers in nursing can be very rewarding and appealing to young people at the very outset of their working lives. Below you’ll find a discussion of some of these career benefits, as well as a description of some of the diverse opportunities available within the overall field, and what kind of compensation you might expect for each.
Benefits of a career in Nursing
If you’ve been pondering several career options, the following benefits of a career in Nursing should be factored into your thinking:
- Resistance to recession – When the economy takes a nosedive, many professionals immediately feel the impact of that, and are either laid off or must accept reduced work hours. The nursing profession is nearly immune to fluctuations in the economy, because the need for health care simply cannot be reduced as a consequence of recession. People will be sick and require nursing care regardless of the changes occurring in the economy.
- Nursing shortage – The Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that by the year 2020, there could be a shortage of as many as 1 million nurses, and even if we fall short of that mark, it’s safe to say this country will need hundreds of thousands more nurses than we actually have.
- Job flexibility – Jobs in nursing are some of the most flexible of any career choices. You have the option of working full-time or part-time, and you can often choose where you want to work, and you can even take a year or two off from nursing, then easily blend right back in to the field when you’re ready.
- Career mobility – Career mobility is often overlooked by professional nurses, but the opportunity is certainly there. After becoming a registered nurse, you can actually branch off into the justice system and become a nurse consultant, you could become a writer, an educator, or even a full-time researcher.
- Pay advantages – The average salary for nurses in general is around $50,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and if you should become a Nurse Practitioner, that can go even a little higher, to around $60,000 annually. With the prospect of overtime pay for weekends and holidays, there is additional potential for earnings, and some nurses who work in Advanced Practices can earn as much as $90,000 annually.
- Location opportunities – Nursing opportunities exist in every state of this country, in every county, and in every city. With the demand for nurses being what it is, you can literally go anywhere you want, and find job opportunities in the field of nursing. You can even become a traveling nurse, and move all around the country if that’s something that appeals to you.
- Diverse patient populations – While nursing in general may involve many of the same healthcare skills, there is still a wide diversity of actual work experience available to you. Specialty certifications have already been mentioned, but you also have the option of working with a particular population of patients. For instance, if you prefer working with infants, that would be one option available to you, and if elderly patients are more your style, that could be another possibility. You could also specialize in pain management environments, drug addiction situations, wound and burn management, and even with mental health patients.
- Second career opportunity – A great many people choose nursing as a second career when, for whatever reason, their first-choice career does not achieve the success they had hoped, or they find that they simply aren’t a good fit for it. Some professionals even work for many years in their primary chosen career, and then retire from it, or simply make a lateral move to nursing, either full-time or part-time, to supplement their income.
- Diversity of specialties – Believe it or not, there are more than 200 specialties in the field of nursing which you can earn a special certification for. Certification indicates that you are an expert in that particular aspect of nursing, and that is often sufficient grounds to earn you a higher salary, as well as greater demand for your specialty service. The great thing about this is that, with so many certifications available, one of them is almost sure to appeal to you.
- Career satisfaction – Nursing is one of the most satisfying and rewarding professions of all, and it also carries a great deal of respect from other professionals of all types. In most situations, patients interact a great deal more with nurses than they do even with doctors, so you are personally involved to a high degree with patients.