If asked to craft your dream career, you’d probably create one that lets you combine your natural talents with the knowledge you gain through education. You may crave a challenging job that positively impacts the world while attracting competitive pay and benefits. The nursing profession fulfills all these requirements and more.
In 2018, the United States had over 4 million nurses, and the field has room for millions more now. If you’re interested in becoming a nurse but still undecided about its benefits, read on to see nine reasons you should pursue online learning to become a nurse.
9 Reasons to Become a Nurse
1. Work in a Trusted and Respected Field
For 20 years, opinion polls have ranked nursing as the most trusted profession above other medical professionals like doctors. Nurses even eclipse middle school teachers and law enforcement. Members of the public consider nurses leaders in honesty, integrity and ethics.
Nurses consistently rank at the top because they provide a humane point of contact for people going through the worst times of their lives. Patients and their relatives are often overwhelmed by sickness and treatment procedures. However, nurses’ compassion and care can make this difficult period easier to bear.
As a nurse, your duties go beyond overseeing patient safety during recovery. You get to:
- Act as a communicator, breaking down clinical procedures in a way they understand
- Help patients and their loved ones maintain a positive mindset
- Advocate for the patient and their loved ones, ensuring their needs are taken care of during this stressful period
If you want a career where people hold you in high esteem because you acted as a beacon of light during a dark time in their lives, you should become a nurse.
2. Benefit From a High Earning Potential
A good income is one of the most appealing factors for pursuing a nursing career. While the exact salary depends on factors like education, specialty and work experience, nurses earn at least double the minimum wage.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), RNs make around $37 per hour, while LPNs make about $23 an hour. You may earn more than the median if you work for a private health facility or qualify as an advanced practice nurse. For example, the Occupational Outlook Handbook places the salary of nurse anesthetists at over $195,000 per year.
3. Choose From a Wide Range of Specialties
After you obtain a nursing degree, you don’t have to remain a bedside nurse who monitors patient safety. You can pursue work as a nurse in any health care field, including:
- Gynecology
- Pediatrics
- Cardiology
- Psychology
If you’re interested in surgical procedures, you could become a nurse anesthetist, or surgical nurse. Or you could decide to work in the traditional health care setting offered by many hospitals or in a private physician’s office.
Some nurses work in schools or as health care providers in ambulatory care, while others provide in-house emergency care for big corporations.
You may also apply your expertise in non-health care settings by becoming a nurse writer, attorney or legal nurse consultant.
So, if you’re interested in a career that opens the door to some of the most exciting avenues in health care, nursing should be at the top of your list.
4. Experience Job Stability
The need for nurses will continue as long as people need health care. According to the BLS, there are over 200,000 job openings for nurses each year. As the population increases and the baby boomer generation ages, there’ll be a nursing shortage, with more care areas opening up and creating new niches for nurses to explore.
Aspiring nurses don’t remain in the market for a job for long due to the high demand for nurses. For example, over 90% of registered nurses gain employment in less than a year after graduation.
Nursing provides job security in the ever-changing health care landscape. As seen recently during the COVID-19 pandemic, nurses remain in high demand even as people in other jobs are made redundant due to bad economic conditions.
Nursing careers are future-proof, persisting even as job automation takes over. Machines can’t entirely replace the patient care nurse practitioners provide. Thus, once you graduate and enter into nursing practice, you may never have to deal with unemployment.
5. Enjoy Flexible Work Conditions
Nursing offers a lot of leeway concerning when and how you work. Nurses who work shifts can get up to 48 hours of free time between calls. Those working in outpatient settings like schools can maintain regular working hours and be off on weekends and holidays.
Nurses who are industry professionals can travel around the world through programs that offer health care where it’s sorely needed. Travel nursing provides flexible schedule nursing, ensuring you maintain a good work-life balance to pursue other personal and career interests.
6. Produce Real Impact
You’re not an invisible cog in health care systems as a nurse. On the contrary:
- Nurses are the first to interact with patients, assessing them to identify critical information about their health needs before administering proper preventive care and treatment.
- You’re also integral in crafting and implementing the care plan for each patient, administering drugs and monitoring patient outcomes.
- As a nurse, you help fulfill a patient’s physical and psychological needs. You’re also an essential point of contact with the patient’s loved ones, expertly bringing them along in the health care journey to alleviate their confusion and stress.
Nurses experience firsthand the effect their work has on people. Depending on your specialty, you can be among the first people to see new life through childbirth.
You get to see the joy of a patient who successfully walks the journey to full recovery. And when a patient is in the intensive care unit or takes a turn for the worse, you can comfort them to reduce their fear and anxiety.
7. Enhance Job Satisfaction
Job satisfaction is one of the most coveted feelings in the world. People want to work reasonable hours in a safe environment and get adequate compensation for their efforts.
A nursing career provides:
- An avenue for practicing what you’ve learned through school, personal and professional experience
- Grounds for testing and enhancing your skills with each patient
- Opportunities to work with health care professionals from different backgrounds and build lasting relationships
A 2017 study found CNAs rated their job satisfaction at 8.2 on a scale from 1 to 10.
8. Explore Growth Opportunities
Nursing offers a lot of opportunities for career advancement even after you enter the job market. You can pursue a BSN degree after graduating with a bachelor’s degree or associate’s degree outside the health sciences.
Many nurses further advance their careers by pursuing master’s and doctorate degrees in a specific industry profession. You can even follow a career path in nursing education or nursing technology.
9. Develop Transferable Career Skills
The skills you develop as a nurse apply in most careers, so you can easily qualify for different positions.
When working as a nurse, you can fine-tune interpersonal skills like patience, compassion and communication. Nursing jobs may also enhance your attention to detail, management skills and ability to work under pressure.
With these transferable skills, you can easily change career tracks and succeed in different positions, whether or not they’re in the health care industry.
How to Pursue a Nursing Profession Online
A career in nursing can be exciting and deeply fulfilling, providing you with the chance to explore your natural talents and build new ones. In most states, you can embark on a career in nursing after acquiring a four-year education. However, depending on your situation, attending classes for four years in a nursing school may not be practical.
If you don’t have the time and resources to invest in the traditional mode of obtaining a nursing degree, offers of cheap accelerated programs may be tempting. Unfortunately, such inaccurate or misleading information about what it takes to become a nurse practitioner will only lead to losses.
However, you can shorten your school search by pursuing a nursing certificate online through Aceso.
About Aceso Nursing School
Our online campus offers multiple programs to help you start a nursing career, including NCLEX review and NCLEX remediation courses. Each course provides hands-on clinical practice with one of our trusted partner programs to help you apply theory in the real world.
Every nursing program bears the Florida Nursing Board certification, so prospective students are assured of a top-notch education. Our nursing students can also request affordable individual tutoring from our expert instructors.
