Historically, nursing is a career path that has most attracted women. As a result, it has also provided women with some of the best opportunities for career progression, especially over the last few decades. There are lots of reasons that women looking to take control of their professional lives and careers should consider nursing as an option. It is a challenging but very rewarding career that requires a whole range of skills in order to succeed.
Here are 7 reasons why nursing is an excellent career for women.
Earn a Versatile Degree
One of the best things about earning a nursing degree is that you will be learning a skill for an industry that is truly recession-proof. It doesn’t matter what else is happening in the world or what the state of the economy is – there is always, always, always going to be a demand for nurses. As a result, those who qualify as a nurse will have a huge range of potential career paths open to them.
Once you have qualified as a nurse, you can choose from one of literally hundreds of different paths and specialisms, and you don’t even have to work in a hospital directly with patients. In fact, the nursing degree is so versatile that you don’t even have to use it in the United States. If you have a degree that you’ve learned in the US, you can easily use it to land a job in a different country.
For many years, nursing has remained one of the most consistently popular degrees in the entirety of the higher education landscape. Data collected by the National Centre for Education Statistics suggest that part of the reason that nursing remains so popular is because it is seen as the first step for people wanting to get into a wide variety of different careers.
Make a Real Difference to People’s Lives
Lots of people are attracted to nursing as a means of entering into a range of different professions, but one thing that all of these people have in common is a near-universal desire to help other people. The work of a nurse is hugely rewarding and worthwhile, but it is far from easy. It is not something that people get into for the money or just because they need to do something as a job.
Nursing demands passion and dedication of its workers, and the industry functions best when it nurtures these qualities. As you progress through your professional nursing career, you will meet senior nurses who can train and help you to develop these and other important skills that you will need in order to advance through the ranks of nursing in the long run.
While you are developing yourself, you will also be making a difference to the lives of your patients on a daily basis and ensuring that they have someone they’re looking out for their interests in what is often one of the most difficult times of their lives. This is where the hugely rewarding nature of the nursing profession comes from and is a big part of what draws so many talented nurses to the work in the first place.
Choose to Study Online
So many people want to study a nursing degree, but attending university on top of working as a nurse is often not feasible. In order to earn each stage of a nursing qualification, a nurse will need to undertake a certain amount of practical work within a hospital. While placements can be arranged by universities, nurses will most commonly study while they are working at a nursing job anyway.
Studying through an online university rather than on campus is useful for a number of reasons, not least of all that it enables students the option of studying their course part-time. For single parents and others who would struggle to juggle the commitment of a degree on top of their nursing duties, the online degree provides them with a viable pathway into and through the nursing profession.
Online degrees are now available through a number of leading universities, and students can study all levels of their nursing qualifications online. This means everything from the initial registered nursing program up to online fnp programs is now available to nurses who want to complete the entire qualification tree through online courses.
The nature of progression within the nursing industry means that it is largely up to the nurses taking the initiative in progressing through the various stages of their qualification. In other words, whenever you feel like you are ready to apply for a more senior position, you can enroll with an online university to study for the appropriate qualification.
Of course, just because you have the necessary qualification that doesn’t mean that a corresponding position will be open at your employer. However, you can keep this degree in your back pocket for when a position does open up, or you can begin applying to other employers to see if there are other more senior positions available elsewhere.
Studying online enables you to earn these qualifications at your own pace and to do so without having to disrupt your existing work schedule too much.
There Are Scholarship Programs Available
Nurses provide an absolutely essential public service, and therefore, we have a shared interest in ensuring that there are always enough of them. As a result, there are a huge number of grants and scholarship funds that exist in order to fund the training of more nurses. There are lots of people who aspire to be nurses and who would make fantastic nurses but are deterred from attempting to enter into the profession because they don’t think they can shoulder the financial costs associated with earning a degree. There are many scholarships now out there that exist to help these people and others who would have difficulty entering the profession.
You Can Progress Through the Ranks at Your Own Speed
Many women are drawn to nursing as a profession because of the opportunities it presents for career progression. Historically, nursing has been one of the best careers for women in terms of providing progression opportunities that continue up to the highest echelons of the profession. Nurses can also control the rate at which they advance through the various stages of their careers and have much more control over their progression than most workers do.
Every time you earn a new nursing qualification, whether it is your first or third, a whole new range of potential jobs will open up to you. Not only will you gain access to more jobs as you earn more qualifications, but you will also gain the opportunity to access more training opportunities. For example, if you aspire to one day work in medical research, then gaining some experience as a frontline nurse in a reasonably senior position will add a lot of value to your resume.
Very High Rates of Job Satisfaction
Nursing has consistently been rated as one of the most satisfying jobs that there is, and this trend has been going on for quite a long time now. It isn’t difficult to understand exactly why nursing is so satisfying – we mentioned how it presents workers with the opportunity to help people in ways that other jobs can’t compete with, but this is just one facet of nursing that makes it so satisfying.
Another key reason that nursing is so satisfying is that it presents so many opportunities for nurses to specialize and focus their professional efforts on a specific area of their industry. This enables nurses to engage with their work in more personal and meaningful terms than many other professionals.
Varied Work Within Roles
Regardless of specifically where you end up working as a nurse, there will inevitably be a whole variety of tasks for you to assist with. The work of a nurse on a day-to-day basis is often very varied, whether you work in an environment where there is a very high turnover rate of patients or where you work with the same patients on a day-to-day basis for years at a time. The work that you undertake will still change regularly, and you will still have to call on a variety of different skills in order to succeed.
As you advance through the nursing ranks and gain new qualifications and training, you will have access to a wider range of potential roles and, therefore, be able to do an even more varied range of work within that role.
Nursing has always been a fantastic career choice for women, and it continues to represent a solid pathway into a variety of different professions. After qualifying as a nurse, you will be able to control the speed and direction of your career progression in a way that very few other types of job allow for. If you are looking for a job that offers excellent progression opportunities, high job satisfaction, and unbeatable job security, working as a nurse is a fantastic choice.
