More than just helping nurses find a job, we want to help nurses find better jobs and higher job satisfaction. This involves a deeper understanding of what your work priorities are and whether they’re being fulfilled in your current position. Many nurses will burnout of the industry much faster than they otherwise would because they waited too long to recognize that it was time to switch positions and find a nursing job that better meshes with their personality. Here’s what our experience in the nursing industry has taught us about specific situations and concerns that can help you find the right job fit.
1. On-Call and Time Schedule Demands
One of the biggest long-term hassles—and one that’s consistently underrated by new nurses—is being on-call. This is a standard job requirement for many hospital jobs, especially those involving direct patient care. It’s easy to justify this job demand when you think about how you’re at least getting paid something when you don’t get called in and a slightly higher rate when you do get called in. Nurses looking to increase their paychecks may actually prefer to get called-in during their on-call shifts. Over the long run, however, the logistical cost of trying to plan things with friends and family as well as the psychological cost of not being able to enjoy your free time tends to add up.
Solution: Take an Industry Job
Unless you have advanced training in specialized nursing skills, an “industry job” is your best bet to find a position with no on-call shifts. Many RNs prefer a job that demands more direct care and skilled nursing, but an occupational health nurse who works for a company, school, or other organization can typically maintain a normal workweek schedule.
2. Gaining Experience and Building Your Resume
There’s a difference between job security and employment security. As a licensed nurse, you’ll probably never have to go long without gainful employment, but this doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to find a job that won’t make you miserable. You may even want to take a job that you know you’re not going to love because it will help you land that dream job down the road.
Are the rewards worth the hassle? What if you’re not really sure what you may or may not want to be doing in the nursing field ten years from now? Even when there’s no perfect answer, early-career nurses would do well to consider how their resume will look in a few years even if they don’t take steps to develop their professional nursing skills.
Solution: Med-Surg Nursing
One of the most popular positions to build your skillset and demonstrate your value as a high-performing nursing professional, the med-surg nurse has evolved over the years into the person who’s responsible for coordinating patient care for acute care services. There may be a stepping stone position you need to take for direct patient care, surgery, emergency department, etc. to build your resume for this position. It’s also a fairly demanding job that frequently serves as a stepping-stone to an even higher position. For these reasons, once you build up your resume a little bit, it’s typically not too difficult to find Med-Surg job postings.
3. Higher Pay and Compensation
Nursing school isn’t free, and if you were already carrying some student loan debt from a bachelor’s degree before you decided to become a nurse, you may be starting your professional career in a hole financially. Then, there are growing household expenses and the stress that comes along with never seeming to get ahead.
Advanced practice nursing is one way to go after a higher pay rate, but this typically involves additional years of training that you may not be able to get through and/or afford to wait to start earning real paychecks. On-the-job training and accruing years of experience will also help, but what if you need to start earning more sooner rather than later?
Solution: Become a Nurse for Hire
It’s one thing to know that you’ll be on-call for a certain number of shifts each week and each month. Leaving this flexibility in your schedule doesn’t always lead to higher pay, however. There are other, more reliable ways to leverage schedule flexibility into a higher pay rate. Per diem nurses can earn more per hour, but with it, comes the stress of not knowing exactly when or where you’ll be working from one day to the next. A travel nurse is more of a happy medium in which you’re still guaranteed a certain number of shifts, you just don’t know where exactly you’ll be working until checking in.
4. Management, Institutional Credibility, and Team Morale
As much as nursing and hospital managers talk about the importance of building a good work culture and strong relationships with co-workers, this culture can change very quickly. A good hire—or a bad one—especially in one or two key positions within a department can signal a sea change to the rest of the team. This is why good work culture is so important but also why it’s so fragile. A more insidious kind of burnout may result from a lack of institutional credibility. Nonsensical budget rules and internal hospital policies that persist for years without explanation hurt job satisfaction.
Often, you may even like your direct supervisor who themselves are subject to these harmful institutional policies. Alternately, if your immediate boss is the problem and you’re tied to your current department and skillset, you may find it easier to transfer to a different job in the same hospital.
Solution: Communication, Participation, and Self-Preservation
As an employee, it’s on you to communicate these types of concerns and work toward reasonable solutions. In some situations, however, the best choice is to look for another position. Whether it’s the work and schedule demands or the problems associated with large bureaucracies, it might be time you consider one of a growing number of nursing jobs outside of the hospital.