Switching career halfway through your working life is an exhilarating prospect, and also a nerve-racking one. It requires courage to make such a big leap, but the vast majority of people who do it are much happier afterwards, and that’s no surprise. It isn’t easy to figure out what you really want to do with the rest of your life when you’re just out of college and have limited experience of the world. Not everybody makes the right call. If you’ve now had more time to think about it and it’s nursing that really calls to you, the next step is to find out more about it and plan the process of transition. This article will help you do that.
The rewards of a career in nursing
One of the most common reasons for people wanting to change career is that they simply don’t feel satisfied where they are. They don’t feel appreciated, or they don’t feel that they’re really doing anything useful. If you’re tired of sitting in an office pushing pieces of paper around with no tangible results except the occasional nod of approval from your boss, nursing can offer you a very different way of experiencing work. Whether you end up working on a hospital ward, on private one-to-one assignments or out in the community, every encounter with a new patient will bring its own rewards. You’ll meet and get to know people from all walks of life and come to understand the world in new ways. You’ll be able to see your efforts transforming people’s quality of life, and sometimes saving lives. You’ll support families in difficult situations and discover your power to make a difference for them when they need it most, in ways that really matter.
Another major reason for changing career after enjoying success in one profession is the desire to give something back to the world. Nursing is the perfect opportunity to do hands-on positive work. Although you will need to set boundaries and look after yourself so that you can look after others, there really is a correlation between the effort you put in and the outcomes for patients. In particular, the more you study and improve your understanding – something that you’ll be encouraged to do throughout your career – the more effectively you’ll be able to help people. When you eventually reach retirement, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that what you did with your life really mattered, and that other people have been able to do more good things with their lives because of it.
The rising demand for nurses
If you’re going to go to the trouble of making a mid-life career change, you’ll need to know that you have good employment prospects after you’ve made the transition. There really couldn’t be a better time to enter the nursing profession. Tackling the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic left many healthcare staff exhausted and resulted in them leaving the profession or taking long-term leave. Many healthcare institutions took the opportunity to restructure. This means that not only is there more demand for nurses than at any other time in our nation’s recent history, but there are also better-structured, better-remunerated jobs for new nurses to move into. In particular, there is a real need for people who are able to move up the hierarchy at speed and fill senior roles.
If this sounds like it might be a short-term phenomenon, don’t worry. There are great prospects in nursing over the long term for the simple reason that we have an aging population, and improved medical techniques mean that people are living longer lives. Although it’s great that people are able to be active for longer, this longevity also means that there are more people with chronic illnesses who need ongoing support from healthcare professionals. This creates opportunity right across the spectrum of nursing roles. While the biggest boom is in geriatric care, planning for longer lives changes the way that younger people invest in their health and creates more demand for educational and preventive work on the part of nurses – it is, of course, always much better to prevent people from getting sick in the first place than to treat them after something has already gone wrong.
A wide range of options
One of the biggest fears that people tend to have about changing careers is that once they’ve made the jump, they’ll find that the new career isn’t as interesting as they had anticipated. With nursing, this isn’t really an issue, because there are lots of different directions in which you can take your new career. Nursing is a huge field that contains multiple specialties and multiple ways of working. Once you have acquired good basic skills and had the chance to learn about different areas, you’ll be able to start focusing on the area that appeals to you most, gaining a lot of new knowledge in the process. Most nurses do this two or three times, but there is not generally any limit on the number of times you can switch specialty if you find this process appealing. By developing multiple specialties, you will find yourself in a position where you can help patients with complex needs that fall under the purview of more than one. Again, due to people living longer, there are more and more patients in this situation.
Popular nursing specialties include cardiology, oncology, pediatrics, geriatrics, rheumatology and midwifery, but there are many more to choose from. You might also specialize in working in a specific context. One of the highest-paid specialties is anesthesiology, because it requires a high level of knowledge and a great deal of precision. Operating room nurses play a vital role in supporting surgeons and monitoring patient health during surgery. ER nurses never know what they will be dealing with next, and do important work in stabilizing patients, calming them down and extracting key pieces of information from them. There’s also mental health nursing, a large field, which offers many different opportunities. You could work with vulnerable patients in a psychiatric institution, support people with chronic mental illnesses who are living in the community, or help people with addictions to stay sober – and much more besides.
Sought-after expertise
What many people fail to realize about nursing is that it’s not all about working directly with patients, and there are many other areas in which expertise gained elsewhere can be really valuable. Perhaps the most significant of these are administration and management. If you have skills in these areas gained from your current role, they could make you very attractive to potential employers in the nursing field. As well as having direct and immediate applications, they can enable you to identify new strategies or introduce different techniques that benefit your new profession. Some nurses focus on academia and build up their qualifications to the point where they can develop new knowledge that can be used to advance the profession as a whole. Bringing in knowledge from outside the field can help with this because it gives you a different perspective, enabling you to ask different questions.
Nursing is a profession in which everybody starts from the same place. Every nurse needs the same basic skills and is required to develop at least two specialties before making significant progress up the ladder. After that, however, available opportunities depend on aptitude, hard work and skills – and those skills that you have brought from elsewhere can make a significant difference. The profession is strictly hierarchical for the same reason that no ship has more than one captain. When dealing with vulnerable people, and sometimes with high-pressure situations, everybody needs to know who to answer to and who to look to for advice, and also who they are responsible for. Previous management experience can be really helpful when coordinating nursing teams and could also give you the option of moving into the upper levels of hospital management or even health policy development.
Other transferrable skills
You might be surprised by the number of other skills you have that can be useful when working as a nurse. Hard skills will, of course, depend on the specifics of your previous career, but nursing also involves a lot of soft skills, some of which you may already have developed at work or through your personal and social activities, and many of which are more familiar or easier to grasp when you’re a little older than the average nursing recruit, just as a result of life experience. You’ll still need to learn how to apply them in the context of nursing, with due regard for your patients’ wellbeing and your own, but you’ll be well placed to make a start. If you want to prepare yourself before you even begin your formal studies, familiarizing yourself with the Nursing Code Of Ethics is a great way to start thinking about key issues in the relationship between nurse and patient so that you can bring your skills to bear in the right way.
The most important soft skills in nursing include efficiency, attention to detail, critical thinking and problem-solving, which are, of course, also valued at senior levels in many other professions. Perhaps the single most important skillset, however, is communication, so if this has been a point of focus in your previous career, then you will be off to a good start. Nurses need to practice active listening, exercise gentle persuasion without coercing patients, and have the capacity to explain quite complex procedures in simple language, making sure that patents or their family members understand. They may even need to do this with young children, because although children usually need their parents or guardians to consent to their treatment, it’s much better all round if they understand, feel confident and are able to engage in surrounding discussions themselves. At the other end of the scale, patients with dementia require careful consideration and support to participate in decision-making.
The benefits of online learning
Whatever career you wish to move into, making that change can be difficult because of the requirement for study. With nursing, you can qualify in a shorter period of time than is the case with many other careers, but it used to be an option that was difficult to access online or through night classes. Thankfully, this has changed. Taking an online nursing program in Maine is now easy to do and, of course, much easier to fit around the demands of your existing job than a full-time, campus-based nursing college course. Holy Family University offers an online course through which you can gain a Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) degree in just 14 months. Although there is a practical element to this, because you will need to build up an adequate amount of hands-on clinical experience, your tutors can help you find a suitable placement nearby and arrange your clinical hours in the best possible way to suit your schedule.
Alongside clinical hours, you will need to spend time watching video lectures, attending tutorials (with various times available to help you avoid clashes) and completing assignments. This does mean hard work, but if you’ve already made your way in another career, you’ll know how to cope with that. What’s more, it will be new, interesting and inspiring work that feels refreshing in comparison to your stale old routine. You’ll be able to connect with fellow students online as well as off, and because the geographical reach of the course is likely to be wider, this is a chance to build up contacts in other areas. If you later decide that you would like to move to a different city or state, you’re more likely to know somebody who can give you the lie of the land and help you find a good job there.
From qualification to practice
When you’ve graduated as a nurse, what happens next? Firstly, in order to practice, you’ll need to pass your NCLEX exam. If you’ve studied hard and acquitted yourself well on your course, then this shouldn’t present any great difficulty. Secondly, you’ll need to apply for a license. This used to have to be done on a state-by-state basis, so any time you moved to a new state you would need to get a new license. However, thankfully the Nurse Licensure Compact now means that licenses obtained in member states, such as Maine, are recognized in every other member state, giving you far more freedom. Once you have your NCLEX certification and your license, you’ll be able to start working. Because you will already have done at least one placement in order to build up your clinical experience, you will have a supportive framework within which to look for a job. You may be able to find a position in the same institution or get recommendations as to where you are likely to fit in and receive the help you need to further develop your skills.
The early years of working as a nurse are generally very structured, and this is a good time to be based in a hospital or similar large institution where you will have a lot of support. This kind of workplace also makes it easier to move between different departments and acquire specialist knowledge that you can use when determining how you wish to specialize yourself. Nursing is rich in opportunities to learn while you earn, and you can expect to be acquiring additional qualifications before very long. At this stage, your options will be wide open, and you should already have made all of the contacts you need to identify the way forward that will suit you best.
Taking the leap
This structured approach to entering nursing means that despite the steep learning curve involved, it’s actually one of the easiest careers to transfer into. Once you’re ready to commit yourself, a lot of the hard work of getting to grips with it and organizing your journey will be taken care of for you. When you do your placement, you’ll find established colleagues very supportive, and further support is available through nursing associations. A lot of mentoring goes on within the profession, making it easier to find your feet. The clearly defined early career path means that you can step forward with confidence, without having to worry about where money is coming from or whether you will be able to find the right fit after graduating.
Although you will need to be physically fit to do the job, nursing is a profession that you can move into at any age. You’ll acquire new skills and also find new ways to utilize those that you already have. There’s so much to look forward to in this exciting new career that you’ll never look back.