What Can I Do With A Nursing Degree?
You’re a lucky fellow if you have a nursing degree. It offers vast opportunities in terms of job availability and demand, rewarding pay package, professional fulfilment, potential areas of growth, and career advancement.
First things first: be registered as a nurse and obtain a license from your state nursing board, if you haven’t done it yet.
Your chances at getting hired will increase with a license. Without a license, you may get hired as personal nurse by families you know, but your chance of landing a clinical job in hospitals and healthcare facilities will be slim.
Work on your first job. Don’t be very choosy; take entry positions even if they don’t give you your dream pay bracket yet. Brighter prospects will come later. The important thing is that the experience will give you the clinical experience often required by more rewarding positions.
With a license and considerable experience, you can actually choose where you want to work and what you want to become.
Visit the HR officer in the hospital where you work and ask about growth opportunities. (If you are a CNA, consider asking if there is any tuition reimbursement if you go from a CNA to RN like mentioned on many sites like allnurses.com and differentmedicalcareers.com)
Consider asking these questions: What vacancies for higher positions are there and what qualifications are required? Do you need to take additional courses and trainings? What certifications do you need to obtain. You must draw your career path; the HR officer can help you with this.
If there seems to be no room for advancement where you are currently working, look around for other hospitals, nursing homes, doctors’ clinics, government offices, organizations, schools and companies. Search for jobs online.
There shouldn’t be a shortage of jobs for one with a nursing degree, a license and experience.
The likely places to be searching for nursing jobs are hospitals, medical clinics, doctors’ offices, healthcare service centers, nursing homes, rehabilitation centers, and assisted-living facilities.
Federal executive offices, especially those in healthcare administration and disease control, have positions for nurses. Inquire vacancies from their websites.
There are unlikely places, too. NASA hires nurses. The bio-medical equipment and aerospace parts manufacturing industries have need for nurses.
The Other Transit and Ground Passenger Transportation industry hires some of the highest-paying nurses in the country. If you take IT-relevant training, you may also work as healthcare IT specialist or technician. An additional background in research will make you an ideal medical or nurse researcher.
Pharmaceuticals and medical equipment companies prefer nurses as sales representatives or marketing specialists.
Look for home-based online jobs. Your nursing knowledge is useful for online nursing schools. You can also look into the possibilities of working as medical transcriptionist, insurance agent, triage nurse, tutor, healthcare recruiter, case manager, medical bill encoder, medical writer, and legal nurse consultant.
Nursing offers a wide variety of jobs and you should now have an idea of what you can do with a nursing degree.
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