What is the reason you do the job you do? What made you choose the career that you have to get up for each day and work hard in? There will be a reason (or perhaps more than one reason) for every decision even if you don’t realize it. You might think you fell into your career by accident, but if that’s the case, what makes you stay in it when there are opportunities to change your career at every step?
The fact is, there are a multitude of different reasons why people pick certain jobs. For some it will be down to money, others will like the work itself, more will enjoy the flexibility that some careers provide or perhaps it’s the routine that drives them.
When it comes to nursing, for most people the reason for choosing it and staying with it is that it is a rewarding career. That’s not to say that it’s not flexible or that it doesn’t pay well, but although these things are important and accurate, they are not usually the first things that come to mind when you’re considering nursing. The first thing that will come to mind is being able to help people. It’s the rewarding nature of nursing. So, what is it exactly about nursing that makes it so rewarding and therefore such a good career choice for so many? Read on to find out.
Nurses Improve The Lives Of Others
In the majority of careers, you’ll be working to improve your own life. That might be through promotion and success, it might be through money, it might be through learning new skills – it could be all of these things at once. This is not a bad thing and you should never feel guilty for making your own life better; it’s actually very important. What if, however, you could improve your own life and improve other people’s lives at the same time? This is what a career in nursing allows you to do.
When people are in hospitals – and other healthcare settings – they might be afraid of what their diagnosis will bring or if they are injured they might be in pain and scared about being away from home and having to undergo treatment. Even the most positive people will have trouble staying positive when they are sick and injured. As a nurse, you can help. You can make the experience as pleasant as possible, even if that might be a hard task. It’s you who makes the difference and can turn a negative experience into something that, if not entirely positive, is certainly better than it might otherwise be. Plus, on a practical level, you can administer the correct treatment to soothe pain and make people feel better – that is certainly an improvement in their lives.
Nursing Offers A Career For Life
Job security can be a worry for some people. They might love their current jobs, but that doesn’t mean they can continue to do it forever; it doesn’t mean they can rely on that career to see them through until they retire. That is problematic, as it means that as much effort as they might be willing to put in, there is always the fear that it will be for nothing.
Nursing is different, as you might expect. In nursing, there is a huge amount of job security. If you choose to become a nurse, you can enjoy that career for the rest of your life, or until you retire – the choice is yours. Of course, in order to truly be successful and make the most of your time working, you’ll need to keep learning, perhaps participating in a distance accelerated BSN online for example, but as long as you do this and you keep up with all the changes that a healthcare position will need you to know about, you can be sure of having a job for life.
This is because nurses will always be needed. In fact, right now there is a nursing shortage, so nurses are needed more than ever. Yet even if there was no shortage, nurses would still be crucial to the smooth running of any healthcare department, and they would be required at all times. Nurses are the bedrock of healthcare, ensuring that patients are well cared for and recover well, so there will always be a job for you if you have a nursing qualification. Plus, because there are so many different options when it comes to nursing, you can move up in your career and find new and interesting ways to be a nurse that you might not even have considered before, ensuring that your working life is always interesting.
Nurses Work With A Variety Of People
Something else that makes nursing a rewarding job is the number of different people you will be able to work with. This is an exciting way to enjoy life and it means you can learn so much about other people, including different cultures and backgrounds. You might even be able to learn more about being a nurse by understanding how different people work and respond to various challenges.
People from a diverse range of backgrounds will all choose to be nurses – there are no restrictions as long as you have the qualifications and a passion for the work. This means that you could be working with many different people from one day to the next, and you’ll have a much broader view of the world than many others because of this; that is rewarding. Not only will you be working with lots of different people, but you’ll be treating lots of different people as well, giving you even more opportunity to learn.
There Is Always Someone There For You
Sometimes jobs are done alone. You might be in an office full of people, but the work you do is down to you and only you. Perhaps you work at home and you’re completely on your own all the time. In these situations and similar ones it can get very lonely. Although it’s true that some people enjoy working alone and prefer to not have anyone else around to talk to, for many people, this would be a sad way to work and they would not enjoy it at all.
If you fall into the latter category, you may well love nursing and find it extremely rewarding. There will always be people around you, from patients to colleagues and more, and you can discuss your feelings and needs with them, or help them depending on who they are and what they need from you.
You can also work in a close-knit team, which is not something that is required in a lot of careers, but which is something that can make a job much more worthwhile. The teamwork required for a positive nursing career is immense, and the closer you are to your colleagues, the easier it will be to do your work successfully.
Nurses can suffer from burnout, which happens when they become emotionally and physically exhausted. Due to the intense nature of the work they do (although this is something that can happen in any profession) nurses are often more susceptible to burnout than others. When a nurse has a good team behind them, not only does the work become easier (although never easy), but there will always be someone to talk to about anything that might be troubling you. This will help to prevent burnout and make the work much more positive once you have talked everything through.
The Work-Life Balance
Almost everyone will have heard of the work-life balance and they will know that it is very important to get that balance just right. Essentially, it means having a good balance between work and everything else, ensuring that you don’t miss out on important life events and don’t work so hard that you never get any time to relax (which can lead to burnout, as we discussed above).
You might not equate nursing with a good work-life balance, especially when you consider there are long shifts to deal with, but the truth is that this career can offer an excellent balance, and it is one of the reasons why it can be so rewarding for people when they decide to take up the challenge of becoming a nurse.
It’s true that nurses do have to work shifts (though in some areas of nursing this is not a requirement) that will encompass weekends, nights, and holidays. It’s also true that when they are not working, nurses have more time off than people in standard ‘nine to five’ jobs. This means there is a lot of opportunity to improve their work-life balance. Going back to our first point about nursing being a way to improve lives, this is yet another way you can improve yours; when you are a nurse, you’ll have all the choice you want as to what you do with your spare time. As well as this, you’ll improve the lives of your family and friends because you can be there for them much more.
