Furthering your nursing career can be rewarding for your professional life and well-being. It helps open new job opportunities, leadership, and specialization roles for you. Advancing your nursing career increases your earning potential and creates better compensation opportunities. It also helps beat job dissatisfaction and burnout, especially if you aren’t happy in your current role.
Advancing your nursing career is the best way to climb the professional ladder while helping you gain more knowledge and skills and preventing career stagnation. Here are five ways to advance your nursing career in Missouri.
1. Further your education
Studying further can be rewarding for your nursing career. It helps advance your skills, including learning clinical care automation, data analysis for improved decision-making, and healthcare workers’ training. Enrolling in advanced nursing education, such as Rockhurst online nursing programs, can help expand your healthcare knowledge regardless of your degree. This can help grow your career opportunities, get promoted, become a leader, and earn more.
As you further your healthcare studies, you’ll learn to make better, more informed decisions, helping you improve operational efficiency, minimize costs, and attain better patient outcomes. It can also help build your nursing resume, making you more attractive to employers in Missouri.
2. Consider specializing
A nursing career can take on various forms, mainly for those who wish to add credentials and specializations to their RN designation. Nursing specializations can give you higher pay and greater responsibilities and help you handle duties you find more meaningful. A specialized nurse meets and surpasses nationally known proficiency and professionalization standards. You become a clinical expert dedicated to offering evidence-based, quality care.
Becoming a specialized nurse helps validate proficiency in your specialty area, increases confidence in your skills, boosts your earning opportunities, makes you more marketable, and equips you with the expertise to deal with complex cases. You can become a nurse practitioner, telemetry nurse practitioner, perioperative nurse, or specialize in other areas of interest.
3. Earn certifications
Certifications are an excellent way to validate your expertise, further your career, make your resume stand out, make your resume stand out, and increase your earning potential. They can also be a requirement in specific nursing specialties. Regardless of whether you’re a specialized nurse or a general one, you can earn certifications like:
- Basic life support (BLS): This training teaches you how to identify multiple life-threatening emergencies and perform CPR promptly and equips you with other key cardiovascular life support skills
- Pediatric advanced life support (PALS): The course teaches you how to give life-saving treatments to children and infants
- Advanced cardiac life support (ACLS): In this training, you review BLS skills, learn how to recognize and manage strokes and cardiac arrest, develop effective communication skills, and learn better airway management strategies
4. Get a nurse mentor
Getting a nurse mentor can help you get the guidance you need to grow and succeed in your nursing career in Missouri. They can volunteer to be your role model, motivator, and advocate, helping you become confident in your role by sharing their experiences.
5. Leverage professional organizations for networking
Finding professional nursing bodies you can join is crucial for networking and spotting new job opportunities. Joining organizations like the American Nurses Association, International Council of Nurses, and National League for Nursing can help you meet like-minded nurses for inspiration to further your career.
Endnote
Advancing your nursing career can be rewarding for your personal and professional growth. Use these tips to further your nursing career in Missouri.
