Is it Worth Being a Nurse: What are the Benefits to a Nursing Career?

If you’re looking for a future job, nursing is one of the strongest fields. While some nursing tasks have now been automated – in countries like Japan robots are used to collect records and hand out medication – advanced motor and empathy skills will remain to be essential to nursing jobs. Therefore, it is unlikely that machines will replace nurses any time soon.

What’s more, the U.S. Census Bureau has reported that by the year 2050, approximately 83.7 million Americans will be aged over 65 years. As more and more Americans age, there will be a greater demand for healthcare professionals including nurses.

Apart from job security, there are several other benefits of choosing a nursing career, including:

Personal Fulfillment

Nurses help save lives on a daily basis, and according to the American Nurses Association (ANA), most nurses find their jobs to be fulfilling at a personal level by helping patients improve their health. Additionally, you will get to choose your own path. This means that you can choose to work with patients directly in hospitals and other healthcare facilities or work with healthy people in clinics.

Regardless of the setting, you will be working in; you could help make a difference in the lives of your patients. You will do this by providing medicine to the sick, provide vaccination to healthy people to protect them from various diseases, and help children get better.

Freedom and Flexibility

As a registered nurse (RN) you might have the freedom to choose your work schedules. Therefore, if you have children, you could decide to work at night so that you are home when your children go and get back home from school. Very few careers have this flexibility to work per diem and part-time. What’s more, you get to choose where to work from a variety of settings. You might be able to work in hospitals, a doctor’s office, and extended care facilities, or provide home health care.

Ability to Specialize

A nursing career gives you the opportunity to choose your specialization right from nursing school and throughout your career. As a nursing student, you will have the freedom to choose the clinical opportunities you want to observe. All these experiences will help you understand the opportunities available to you after graduating from nursing school.

There are numerous specialization opportunities for nurses. While you may work directly with patients in the hospital, you can choose to work in different specialties depending on the illness of your patients. For instance, you can specialize in cardiac patients, post-surgical care, emergency nursing, and stroke victims among others.

Additionally, you can decide to work outside the hospital. There are nursing opportunities in other settings, including prisons, insurance companies, schools, and large corporations.

Advancement Opportunities

Armed with your nursing degree, you can become a team leader whereby you will lead your shift at work and perform some management tasks. You will then advance into a unit leader position and lead all shifts on the unit. The good news is that most of these leadership positions won’t require further education apart from a nursing degree which you will have already earned. After obtaining experience in management positions, you can then advance and become an assistant director of nursing and lead nurses from several other units.

Travel Opportunities

Technology has helped improve the health industry in different ways. Additionally, companies are using technology to match nurses in locations that are looking for qualified nurses. You could be able to choose your specialty and the area where you would want to work. What’s more, companies that look for traveling nurses often pay the travel costs.

To start working as a traveling nurse, most employers require that you have a nursing degree and have worked for at least two years. Traveling nurse job opportunities are plentiful and exist in every state. You could choose to either work in rural areas where there are few qualified registered nurses or you can travel to an urban area where nurses are needed in high numbers. Nursing positions are also available overseas and you can travel to countries like the United Kingdom where you can get a work visa and work for up to one year.

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Are you interested in becoming a nurse? If you want to earn a Bachelor of Science Degree in Nursing, consider ECPI University's accelerated degree program. For more information on this exciting opportunity, connect with a friendly admissions advisor today.

It could be the Best Decision You Ever Make!

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Gainful Employment Information – Bachelor of Science in Nursing – Traditional Track

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