Nursing is not just a job, it's a vocation, which is a nice way of saying that compensation is not what draws people in.
Why is it that all of the helper careers—teachers, social workers, nurses—seem to pay participants primarily with the sense of personal and professional satisfaction?
While a lack of career mobility frustrates many nurses and, in fact, contributes to the very high level of professional churn that the profession is known for, there are opportunities beyond that of floor nursing.
In this article, we take a complete look at career advancement for nurses.
Overview: What Does Career Advancement Traditionally Look Like in Nursing?
For most nurses with a base credential, the potential for career advancement is profoundly limited.
It's not just that there aren't many promotion opportunities—it's that salary expectations and depth of responsibility thresholds are not defined by performance.
Mostly, they're based on seniority; the longer you've worked at a hospital, the more money you'll make.
Raises are typically scheduled and incremental, meaning that a nurse getting hired today will have a general idea of how much money they will make from the day they retire.
In corporate life, the situation is quite different: the harder you work, the more your earning potential goes up.
While healthcare and big business are fundamentally different in certain ways and unpleasantly similar in others, the compensation and incentive structure that businesspeople are familiar with could go a long way toward improving retention figures within healthcare.
People tend to stick around in careers where they have a chance to earn more money and gain higher levels of responsibility. While the promotion track is fairly limited for nurses, there are additional opportunities that lie on the other side of a credential.
In the next few headings, we'll take a look at what these potential career options look like.
Specialized Certifications
Specialized certifications are arguably the easiest and most straightforward way to advance your career as a nurse.
Specialized roles are not exactly promotions, but slightly different categories of employment.
Nevertheless, they allow nurses to do their work in a more specifically defined capacity. Where a floor nurse might work with patients experiencing a wide range of symptoms, a specialized nurse will typically focus on a very specific area of medicine, for example, education, psychiatric concerns, heart health, neonatal care, forensic medicine, etc.
The benefits of specialized positions are several:
- Nurses with special certifications generally make more money
- They are in higher demand
- They get to do work that is of the highest interest to them
The nice thing about specialized certifications is that you can start your dream job while you work on achieving them.
Most certifications require hundreds or even thousands of hours of field experience, which means you literally have to start working in the profession before you've been certified.
What generally happens is that you'll work under a fully certified nurse until you've gained your credential.
This process takes two to three years in many cases. After that point, you can work without supervision and will generally experience an increased rate of pay.
At the same time, there are many dozens of different certification options, making this one of the easiest and most commonly utilized methods of expanding professional opportunities for nurses.
Graduate School
Another excellent, though more difficult, option for nurses who want to increase their opportunities is to consider graduate school.
Advanced practice positions come with significantly higher compensation, often starting in the early six figures and increasing with seniority.
They also benefit from a considerably higher level of responsibility. Nurses who have received graduate degrees can sometimes write prescriptions, diagnose patients, and make long-term healthcare plans.
FNPs, or family nurse practitioners, are nurses with graduate degrees who function almost exactly the same way a general practitioner would.
In fact, many people see FNPs as their primary caregiver and never notice any difference at all. Graduate programs are not as user-friendly, in many cases, as specialized certification routes.
You cannot start working as an advanced practice nurse until you've gotten your graduate degree, which means there is a two- to three-year delay between when you start and when you begin seeing the benefits of your work.
During that time, most nurses also have to juggle school and work, which adds an extra layer of complexity to the process.
It is worth noting that most graduate programs geared toward nurses understand this struggle at least partially and arrange coursework to suit the schedule of a busy nurse as well as possible.
There are even online options that feature pre-recorded learning modules that allow you to work on your own time frame.
Conclusion
The fact of the matter is that most nurses don't want a hyper-competitive world of promotion hunting.
They just want to take care of people and be compensated proportionate to the value of their work.
The existing professional advancement framework doesn't quite satisfy that desire for every nurse, but that's not to say that there aren't opportunities available for people who seek them out.
It is true that simply getting your BSN and working really hard for 40 years won't necessarily be enough to create promotion opportunities or vastly increase your earning potential.
Nevertheless, that's not to say that the professional trajectory for nurses has to be entirely flat.
To gain opportunity, you do need to be willing to consider advanced credentials, either in the form of graduate school or a specialized certification.
On the other side of a few years of work, there is ample opportunity for significantly increasing your earnings and gaining considerably more autonomy in the bargain.
It's a worthwhile arrangement for anyone who loves healthcare but can't quite imagine working in an emergency room or hospital floor for the entirety of their career.
With a Bachelor’s in Health Science along with an MBA, Sarah Daren has a wealth of knowledge within both the health and business sectors. Her expertise in scaling and identifying ways tech can improve the lives of others has led Sarah to be a consultant for a number of startup businesses, most prominently in the wellness industry, wearable technology and health education. She implements her health knowledge into every aspect of her life with a focus on making America a healthier and safer place for future generations to come.
Disclaimer: The viewpoint expressed in this article is the opinion of the author and is not necessarily the viewpoint of the owners or employees at Healthcare Staffing Innovations, LLC.