Nursing is a job that everyone can do, but not everyone should. To be a good nurse – and to enjoy the job you are doing – you need to want to help people; you need to be compassionate and caring. Nursing is an emotionally tough job that is also somewhat physically challenging at times, and you need to be organized, strong, able to work in a team and by yourself making important decisions.
If you do feel that nursing is the career for you. In that case, there are many reasons why you will love it, and why choosing to study to be a nurse either right out of high school or later in life, perhaps even after you have retired from a job you’ve had for many years in an entirely different sector, is a great idea. Read on to find out more.
A Real Part of a Team
When you are a nurse, you will be a real part of a very tight team, working together to help patients and their families recover from many different illnesses, conditions, and accidents. No matter how busy a shift might be and no matter what had to be done or what was experienced, knowing that you have your team behind you is hugely comforting and something of a boost to encourage you to continue.
Of course, nursing also requires a lot of lone work. You will need to make life or death decisions, carry out work by yourself, and sometimes, depending on the department you are working in, you might be alone for many hours at a time. Yet you’ll have your team around you anyway; even if the nurses you are talking to aren’t in your department, you will still be able to ask for advice during your break or perhaps just chat about something different to clear your mind. It’s an important element of nursing, and there are very few careers that will give you the chance to make such life-changing bonds.
Career Growth
When you think of nursing, do you think of career growth? If you don’t know much about the profession, it could be that you don’t think about career growth at all, but the truth is that nurses have many different opportunities to advance their careers if they want to. Even those who come to the profession later in life can take online ABSN programs that will help them reach their dream career at their dream level more quickly.
This means that those who have ambitions to reach the very top of their own personal career ladder can see those ambitions become a reality when they take on the mantle of being a nurse. However, if you don’t have these ambitions and don’t feel the need to keep advancing in your career, you don’t have to; nursing will give you the chance to find a position you’re happy with and stay there for the rest of your career should you choose to. This is why nursing is potentially something for anyone to do since no matter what career path someone wants to choose, nursing will give it to them.
Learn New Things Every Day
If you love discovering new things and you understand why it’s important to keep learning, nursing can be an ideal career for you. To begin with, there are always many different innovations and ideas being developed that are meant to make nursing easier for everyone, including the patient. It is wise to keep up to date with any changes that are happening within nursing so that you can be ready to start doing things in a different way if required.
It’s also useful to go back to school if that’s something you feel will benefit you and those around you. Apart from the ABSN we mentioned above, there are several different degrees that nurses can take to add to their qualifications, giving you the chance to learn something new and implement that knowledge at any time.
Finally, you’ll learn from your patients too. By talking to people and discovering more about them, understanding them better as people, you will find that you absorb a lot of information. It won’t all be useful with regards to your own life, but that isn’t really the point; the point is that you’re keeping your brain active, and that’s a healthy thing to do.
You Will Empower Others
Nurses actually have a lot of power. One of the things they can do with that power is to empower others with their knowledge. By passing on relevant information to patients and their families, the nurse is giving them more power too; more power to understand their own bodies and more power to understand what the next steps are and what they need to do, as well as what the medical staff need to do to make things better.
This is an unbelievable feeling, and many nurses can see it happening. As they explain the details to their patients, they see understanding start to dawn on their faces, and this will, in turn, empower the nurse to keep on improving and explaining, and moving forward.
Nurses can also empower other nurses. As mentioned above, nurses work in a close team, and if one has a problem, other nurses can step in to help. This is empowerment as well, ensuring that everyone has the same knowledge and can deal with the same problems.
You’ll Meet Many People
As a nurse, you will meet a variety of different people from many different backgrounds, which is a privilege not many other people will ever get to experience. From your colleagues to your patients to the people who are training you and the people you yourself are training, there will be people you understand immediately because they are like you, and others who you will learn to understand, even if they seem very different at the start.
This is something that many nurses truly enjoy; it’s unusual, even in a multicultural society. It’s a crucial step forward in making the world a better place. It might only be a small step, but it’s an incredibly important one, and nurses are leading the charge.
