Continued professional development is crucial to help nurses grow their skills, improve job satisfaction, and prevent burnout. Nurses working in hospitals that implement burnout-reduction strategies — including professional mobility opportunities, wage increases, and educational opportunities for learning and leadership — typically experience a 20% decrease in burnout and stay in their roles for longer (3.5 years on average, compared to just 2.9 years for nurses without access to burnout-reduction strategies), a study published in the Journal of Patient Safety reveals. By engaging in professional development opportunities — such as courses, certifications, seminars, workshops, and online learning modules — you can advance your expertise and better navigate the demands of your role with confidence and resilience, proactively preventing burnout and fostering a fulfilling and sustained career in healthcare.
Enhancing Skills
Professional development opportunities allow you to progress your knowledge and skills and stay current, competent, and adaptable in your dynamic healthcare role. In turn, you’ll prevent career stagnation — a key driver of nurse burnout. It’s unfortunately not uncommon for nurses to feel stuck in their careers at some point, whether that’s because the work’s no longer challenging or you’re looking for a greater degree of professional autonomy. A lack of professional growth and development opportunities (stagnation) can naturally result in frustration, disengagement, and a diminished sense of purpose in your career. Fortunately, by developing your knowledge and skills, you’ll increase your competency and sense of accomplishment, positively impacting your overall wellbeing.
For example, suppose you’re in a particular subfield like neonatal or psychiatric-mental health nursing. You may want to get certified in this specialty to validate and update your knowledge base and skill set. In addition to broadening your skill set, specialized credentials and advanced degrees also showcase your commitment to professional development and your career, helping you stand out to employers. Personal tutoring can also conveniently aid your professional development in a way that fits your schedule. Personal tutors can provide a customized learning experience focused on the specific skills or areas you want to improve. They can also help you manage your study time effectively, helping you balance professional responsibilities with ongoing learning initiatives.
Boosting Professional Self-esteem
Healthcare workers with low self-esteem are almost three times more likely to experience acute stress and burnout compared to healthcare workers with high self-esteem, a recent study published in the journal Safety and Health At Work reveals. At its core, high self-esteem involves trusting your judgment and decision-making abilities. It contributes to more effective team relationships. Low self-esteem leads to either too compliant or too rebellious behavior, creating an unpleasant and unproductive work environment and increasing the risk of burnout. By fostering skill mastery and recognizing your expertise through achievements and certifications, professional development can give you a vital sense of competence, confidence, and the opportunity for career advancement. As a result, you’ll feel more significant self-esteem and job satisfaction and be more resilient and capable in your role. In turn, you’ll, therefore, effectively reduce the emotional exhaustion and depersonalization that’s associated with burnout. Notably, in a 2023 study published in Sage Journal, nurses who participated in professional development opportunities provided by their hospital reported an overall increase in self-esteem and greater motivation to do their job well, which also has the bonus of improving patient care.
Improving Team Collaboration
By fostering collaboration, communication, and shared learning experiences, professional development can also improve teamwork and morale among nurses. Notably, effective teamwork is pivotal in preventing burnout and, specifically, reducing emotional exhaustion and depersonalization (referring to emotional distancing from patients and colleagues) among nurses while also improving professional accomplishment. Professional development typically involves group sessions — including seminars, workshops, and training events — where you can learn collaboratively, therefore helping to strengthen your teamwork and communication skills. Health workers who actively engage in teamwork have also been found to endure challenges better and experience less emotional exhaustion on average. Additionally, the connection between solid teamwork and reduced levels of depersonalization suggests that interacting and sharing experiences with team members fosters a sense of belonging, positivity, and fulfillment, aiding healthcare workers in overcoming challenges, avoiding isolation, and preventing burnout.
Continued professional development plays a crucial role in preventing burnout and improving wellbeing among nurses. By enhancing your knowledge and skills, boosting your self-esteem, and improving team collaboration and communication, professional development can help you foster a rewarding, sustained nursing career and keep your risk of depression, anxiety, and burnout to a minimum.
Networking is standard among many professionals, but nurses aren’t generally natural or willing networkers. Many nurses go to work, serve their patients, collaborate with their colleagues, and even save lives along the way, and then they understandably want to go home to their families.
LinkedIn is arguably the top online professional networking platform. Consultants, doctors, lawyers, psychologists, and entrepreneurs connect through LinkedIn. The millions who use the platform make it an active and robust community where people spend time seeing, being seen, sharing, and, most importantly, connecting with like-minded professionals.
While some may view the potential of LinkedIn as nothing more exciting than an online resume, there’s a great deal more to the story.
Your LinkedIn profile is your window into the professional online world, and there’s so much that others can learn about you from your headshot, “About” section, work history, the organizations you belong to, where you were educated, your top skills, and even awards and recognition you’ve received. Your profile should be complete, information-packed, well-written, and engaging, and there are plenty of tricks and hacks for making it stronger and more effective.
Since LinkedIn is a search engine, keywords matter, so your profile should be chock full of keywords related to your skills, career, and experience. And since many recruiters use LinkedIn to find potential job candidates, the more complete and keyword-rich your profile is, the more likely you are head-hunted for a job you may want to consider.
In essence, the LinkedIn 101 lesson to absorb is to ensure you have an optimized profile so that people who encounter you on the platform have a good sense of who you are and where your expertise lies.
Take it a Few Steps Further
Once you have a complete profile, you’re ready to head into the LinkedIn universe. A simple way to get started is to use the search function to find:
Fellow nurses and healthcare professionals in your local area or further afield
Nurses who share your same expertise or interests
Employees of specific organizations and facilities
Organizations and companies to follow and research
The leaders of organizations and facilities you’d like to explore as potential employers
Recruiters
Job postings
LinkedIn Groups of like-minded professionals
Aside from these search functions, you can also use your LinkedIn feed to find news, articles, posts, and commentary by other users and organizations you follow. Using keywords (or random scrolling), you can become involved in conversations in the comments section of others’ posts and even share your thoughts, reflections, and opinions with links to articles, research, or news of note.
Part of the secret sauce of connecting on LinkedIn involves coming across someone you find interesting and risking sending them a private message and asking to connect. You can invite them for a Zoom chat or phone call. If they work at an organization you’re interested in, or if they have an area of professional focus that intrigues you, these can be golden opportunities to get an insider’s view of a particular nursing specialty, a facility of interest, or perhaps a general area of the healthcare industry that you’re curious about.
For example, let’s say that you’ve always wondered what the career of a Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner (PMHNP) is like. So, you type that title into the search bar, and up comes people, jobs, posts, events, and companies related to your search. These results are an excellent jumping-off point to explore what kinds of jobs are out there, the salary ranges offered, who’s doing this sort of work, what companies employ them, and what people say about advanced practice nursing.
While any research you do on LinkedIn isn’t going to be the last word on a topic, it can be a treasure trove of information to sift through and get you started.
Dare to Network Like There’s No Tomorrow
In the final analysis, so much good can come from deciding to use LinkedIn as the networking tool that it is. There are thousands of interesting, talented, and knowledgeable people, some of whom would be happy to connect with you.
Networking involves little risk with the potential for significant reward. Thus, the return on investment for your time and energy can add up to some serious dividends. After all, it only takes one fantastic connection to change your life and career.
If you don’t put yourself out there and ask for what you want, someone will not likely hand it to you out of the blue. This is where the networking rubber truly hits the road. Squeaky wheels get their fair share of grease in the professional world, and your journey down your career highway can be informed as much by the people you know as what you’re capable of doing.
If you can accept the dare to create a LinkedIn profile to be proud of and use it to be a bold and audacious networker, there’s no end to the magic that might happen. But if you sit at home in your living room waiting for the magic to happen spontaneously, you’ll probably end up waiting quite a long while.
LinkedIn isn’t going anywhere, so sign up, log on, maximize your profile, and truly network like there’s no tomorrow.
In an evolving healthcare landscape, many hospitals and health systems have a diverse nursing staff of tenured employees, contractors, specialists, and more. While this can be a recipe for a dynamic and collaborative environment, it also has the potential to become precarious without proper management.
Disorganization and lack of communication ultimately trickle down to patients. In fact, a Joint Commission study found that 80% of serious medical errors result from miscommunication during nursing handoff.
With the continued staffing shortages in healthcare, organizational culture is ever more critical for maintaining morale among existing staff.
For one, nursing departments should strive to create balanced schedules and assignments that work for each employee and even out workloads as much as possible. Departmental leaders should be transparent about organizing so there is no perception of inequality. If everyone feels they are pulling the same weight, they will work together better.
However, in departments that rely heavily on contract and travel workers, there can be friction for similar reasons, including doubt about contractors’ workloads, level of commitment, and their skills and qualifications. This is where leaders must emphasize clarifying any misconceptions and the benefits they provide beyond crucial coverage for short staffing, such as adaptability, diverse perspectives, and specialized knowledge.
Shared governance is also becoming a standard practice in many healthcare organizations to empower nurses and foster collaboration. It is a working model where nurses can join councils, allowing them to be involved in decision-making for their departments and patients.
Clear Roles and Responsibilities
There shouldn’t be any ambiguity about assignments and responsibilities among everyone involved in patient care, from RNs to LPNs and UAPs. Along with their daily schedules, consider writing down each employee’s responsibilities in a shared document that everyone can access and reference. This ensures each employee knows exactly what their tasks are and that there is no gap in patient care coverage.
However, it’s also essential to leave room for spontaneous teamwork. For instance, a nurse has a free moment and responds to a patient not in their assigned block to help out another nurse with their hands full. While this isn’t a requirement or expectation, it should not be frowned upon.
Established Onboarding and Training Processes
Onboarding and training can be essential for setting the tone – what the standard operating procedures are, what the day-to-day job will look like, and the organization’s culture. If the goal is to have a cohesive team, these processes should be standardized for all types of staff, whether direct hire or contract worker.
In addition, all staff should have the same continuing education and growth opportunities, promoting a culture of equality and professional development and ensuring that every team member has the resources and support necessary to excel in their roles.
Transparent Communication Among Nursing Staff
In a hospital or clinical environment, losing track of so many moving parts is easy. Nursing teams need multiple modes of communication to ensure they are organized and on the same page.
This includes having proper tools to communicate, especially around patient care. Traditional chart notes and whiteboards in rooms are not going anywhere. Still, many organizations are also integrating newer technologies, such as HIPAA-compliant messaging platforms, for instant communication between staff members. This is especially helpful during emergencies to speed up response time to critical patients.
Good teamwork also means holding one another accountable, creating an environment where employees feel comfortable discussing their challenges and concerns, and collaboratively working to overcome them.
However, there should be an established feedback process for issues that need further addressing. For example, a staff member is consistently underperforming or making mistakes, affecting others – or worse, patients. Staff should know who to escalate these issues to, whether it is department leadership or HR, and how so that they can address and resolve the issue immediately.
Regular Team and Staff Meetings
Teams and departments should be meeting regularly to share important information and updates, as well as coordinate and plan, ensuring alignment of goals and objectives for the team and the organization. Meetings can also provide a forum for problem-solving, decision-making, and feedback, allowing employees to voice their opinions, share ideas, and actively participate in discussions. Additionally, meetings are an opportunity for recognizing and acknowledging individual and team accomplishments.
All these forms of engagement instill a sense of duty and shared ownership, which are fundamental components of a positive workplace culture and effective teamwork. Pair this with solid operational organization and communication to create an unstoppable nursing team that puts patient care at the forefront.
Defining your nursing career and life goals for 2024 involves considering various aspects of your personal and professional development.
Here’s a guide on how to structure your goals into ten categories:
Career Advancement
Specify the position or level you aim to achieve in your career by the end of 2024. Consider factors like promotions, leadership roles, or new responsibilities.
Here is a big tip: Look up job descriptions of positions you want to obtain, and there you go. You have a step-by-step outline of how to get it!
Professional Development
Outline specific steps for enhancing your skills and knowledge. This may include attending workshops, completing certifications, or pursuing advanced degrees.
Consider taking a course in Artificial Intelligence. Many universities and colleges offer different courses. This will be a great skill to obtain and put on your resume.
Financial Objectives
Clearly state your financial goals, such as savings targets, debt reduction plans, or investment strategies. Identify specific actions to achieve these financial milestones.
Be as specific as you can with your financial goals.
Health and Wellness
Define health and wellness goals, such as maintaining a specific fitness routine, adopting a healthier diet, managing stress effectively, and getting regular check-ups.
It is nice to have a weight goal in mind; however, focus more on a healthier lifestyle. Start small, such as walking up the stairs instead of an elevator.
Networking and Relationships
Set goals for expanding your professional network and strengthening personal relationships. This could involve attending networking events, joining industry groups, or scheduling regular quality time with loved ones.
Commit to one in-person networking event in a month or once a quarter.
Work-Life Balance
Determine how you will better balance your work and personal life. This might include setting boundaries, prioritizing self-care, or planning vacations.
Schedule self-care such as massages, trips, spa days, etc.
Skill Diversification
Identify new skills you want to acquire or existing skills you wish to enhance. This could involve learning a new language, mastering a new technology, or developing soft skills like communication and leadership.
Did I consider taking a course in AI!?
Community Involvement
Define your goals for contributing to your community. This might include volunteering, participating in local initiatives, or supporting charitable causes.
Consider mentoring!
Travel and Exploration
Specify travel goals for the year, whether it’s exploring new destinations, taking a specific number of trips, or experiencing different cultures.
Personal Growth and Hobbies
Outline goals related to your personal development and hobbies. This could involve pursuing creative interests, learning a musical instrument, or engaging in activities that bring you joy and fulfillment.
Consider taking a cooking class, dancing, or art!
When setting these goals, ensure they are: SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
Regularly review your progress and adjust your goals as needed throughout the year.
Be accountable. Have self-discipline. Take Action. Stop Making Excuses.
You can make it happen! Write it down on paper and read it every day.
Your nursing career is yours to create, and every nurse’s path can be unique, innovative, and distinctive with proper care and attention. At the same time, all of your obligations and responsibilities might steer you away from your uniqueness and lead you into a rut of choosing the easier way, the path of least resistance.
There are many strategies for choosing a career journey that fits with your vision of who you want to be as a nursing professional, and it’s worth exploring those strategies to move forward confidently.
Thoughtfully Assess Your Career
There are plenty of questions you can ask as an excellent place to begin your career self-assessment:
Looking back, how and why did you make confident career choices?
Did you take a med-surg job right out of school because everyone said you should, even though it went against what you truly wanted?
Have you tolerated bullying or incivility because you didn’t think you had any other choice?
Did you accept imperfect jobs for fear of not being offered anything better?
Do you need to be in a different specialty or working with the wrong patient population?
Would you prefer to be in a non-clinical role?
What skills, knowledge, and experiences do you most value?
What are your greatest gifts, and have you found ways to use them in your career?
So many factors can lead to poor choices; sometimes, the worst choice is doing nothing. If you’re suffering from boredom, job dissatisfaction, or burnout, you may be stuck because you haven’t had the energy to do anything about it; instead, you continue to slog it out day after day.
They say that a life well-lived is the best life of all. A well-lived career is one where you choose based on your deepest desires, not what professors, colleagues, family, blogs, books, and articles say. When contemplating your nursing career, is it what you want it to be?
Make a Plan
Only careers advance with effort. If you have ruby red shoes that can instantaneously transport you to the job of your dreams, good for you. But for most of us mere mortals, we must do the dirty work to get there.
If you’ve asked yourself some of the questions above, perhaps you’ve realized that changes must be made to move forward with self-assurance and grace. So, how do you make a plan to do that? Once you’ve answered the difficult questions honestly, you must face the music and proactively initiate change.
For example, let’s say you’ve spent the first eight years of your nursing career in med-surg, telemetry, and stepdown, and now you realize that hospice is what you’ve always wanted but have been afraid to explore a non-acute setting. What proactive steps can you take? You can call a friend who works in hospice and ask if you can pick her brain. You can also ask if she can introduce you to her manager so that you can ask for an informational interview to learn more. And you can hop on LinkedIn and reach out to hospice nurses and nurse managers in your area.
Meanwhile, you can consume journals, blogs, podcasts, and other media. You can attend an in-person or virtual hospice conference or seminar for further research. These valuable activities may lead you to great clarity, more questions, or maybe a realization that hospice isn’t a good fit for you.
Speaking of not being a good fit, sometimes we can reverse engineer our career reinvention by identifying what we don’t want to do and crossing those off our list. In this way, we narrow the field to what catches our attention, and then we can take a deeper, focused dive into those potential paths.
A Creative Career Trajectory
A creative and innovative approach to your nursing career is critical to long-term satisfaction. You can easily fall victim to “groupthink,” the tendency to go along with the crowd and do what “everyone” seems to think is the “right” thing, even when your gut tells you otherwise.
It’s not necessarily easy to go against the grain, but many nurses have carved a distinctive path, beginning with the godmother of modern nursing, the courageously innovative Florence Nightingale. With Ms. Nightingale as your model of a nurse who didn’t flinch while carving out her journey, you can look your career square in the eye, assess who you truly want to be as a nurse, and then take thoughtful steps toward bringing that vision to fruition.
In these days of distressing news about nursing shortages, inadequate staffing, nurse burnout and compassion fatigue, moral injury, and the ongoing corporatization of healthcare, nurses and their healthcare colleagues continue to find their pathways to solace, healing, and perseverance despite the odds.
On the flip side, for those nurses who feel they’ve reached their limit and need to exit stage left in search of greener pastures, how do we reconcile ourselves to that highly understandable choice?
Nurses deserve to feel whole, well, and fulfilled, with some finding their way within a robust profession with an illustrious history and others eventually moving on beyond bedside care and perhaps beyond the profession entirely. All choices are valid, and all deserve to be honored.
Nurses are powerhouses of human will, determination, grit, and dedication. Whether they remain in the profession long-term or eventually find other pathways to personal and professional fulfillment, the average nurse’s character and make-up are worthy of admiration.
Of Lifeblood and Hardship
Nursing is hard work. Death, suffering, and the frailty of human life surround us. Our work is largely built upon the need to assuage others’ pain.
Brokenness can be found anywhere you look in healthcare. This brokenness can lead to despair and collapse. We see depression, PTSD, distress, and even suicide, and some do indeed leave nursing for other career paths.
No justification is needed when a nurse decides to move on. Everyone has their capacity for toil and struggle, and leaving the profession is not a cause for criticism or blame. Suppose a nurse sees the necessity to find a new avenue in life and career. In that case, we should be able to offer unconditional support and positive regard, rejoicing for that person’s strength to carve their way forward, even when it means leaving their scrubs and stethoscope behind.
Our profession has seen its share of hardships (e.g., racism, sexism, homophobia, misogyny, etc.) throughout its long history, and the coronavirus pandemic did us no favors. Yes, citizens banged pots and pans in our honor, and hospitals strung up “Heroes Work Here” banners, but once the crisis was over, we went back to business as usual, namely short-staffing overwork and the ignoring of nurses’ all too apparent struggles.
Despite it all, we’ve provided care for our patients, held the hands of the sick and dying, entered the homes of those in need of our expertise, and continued to function as the lifeblood and connective tissue of a system that’s often such a challenge to be a part of. The hardship is real, but so is the triumph of a fulfilling and successful nursing career.
Powerhouses of the Highest Order
Even amidst the existential challenges, many agitate for change, using their voices to speak the truth of what they see and experience each day. Through articles, advocacy and lobbying, labor actions and collective bargaining, nursing organizations, social media, videos, and podcasts, nurses identify and use their favored platforms to push back against the forces that attempt to keep them silent and complacent.
For those who stick it out, fight the good fight, and strive to improve things for themselves, their colleagues, patients, and their loved ones, there’s much to be done in the ongoing struggle. Fantastic work is being done out there, and nurses are tapping their innate advocacy and diplomacy skills every day.
We can be broken, but we can also be healed and whole. Some of us find that we need to exit stage left from the profession and never look back, and that’s fine — we all have choices we make for our reasons. But for those who stay the course, we need to support them in their work and amplify their voices however we can.
Nurses aren’t superheroes with unlimited capacity for suffering, but we do have the capacity to be powerhouses of the highest order. In fact, being such a powerhouse is the default setting for nurses the world over.
