Arianna Jordan is a freelance writer who writes about the nursing profession, often writing about specific items used in nursing such asscrubs.
For those individuals who are looking for a career with long-term earning potential, lots of opportunity for advancement and a wide range of settings in which to work, those are just a few of the many advantages of earning a degree in nursing. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the health care industry will grow by 21% by 2016, opening hundreds of thousands of jobs.
The majority of those jobs will be in the home health care field, which will grow by 51%. According to the Occupational Outlook Handbook, the demand for registered nurses alone will increase by 35%, adding another 700,000 jobs to the marketplace. That means that there will be more opportunities than ever to find a job in nursing. In these economic times, ease of finding a job is a major plus to earning a degree in Nursing.
Requirements for getting a job in the nursing field, however, are getting more stringent. It is no longer enough to have a diploma from a nursing school, not if you want a job that pays well and the ability to decide where and how you want to work. In fact, the highest paying jobs in nursing and health care will be going to those who have advanced degrees.
Higher certification standards mean that those who do not have at least a nursing certification will not be able to work in the field at all. If your intent is to get a nursing job that pays well, a certificate or license is no longer enough. You really need a degree to expect a promotion to management or even floor management in nursing.
Nurses with advanced degrees will find unexpected doors opening to them. More and more hospitals are requiring at least a B.S. in Nursing for their charge nurses and head nurses. A B.S. in nursing will also put you in the running for other management jobs, as well as for specialized jobs within the field of nursing. Those specialized fields may include Trauma Center nursing, pediatric nursing, psychiatric nursing or nutritional counseling.
Other nursing degrees will give you more autonomy as a nurse than most Registered Nurses can expect. A nursing degree may open the door for you to become a nurse practitioner, with the ability to diagnose and prescribe for patients, or a nurse midwife. A nurse with a degree concentration in business and management may manage a nursing home, a hospice or a nutritional clinic. A nursing degree with a concentration in research can open the door to working in medical research. In short, as in any other career path, further education opens more doors to advance your nursing career both personally and professionally.
Advantages of Earning a Degree in Nursing
- You’ll always be able to find a job.
There’s more to this than the aging of the Boom Generation, too. Medical science is opening new doors in the health care industry from home health care to community nursing. There will always be jobs for qualified nurses, and those who have nursing degrees will always get hiring preference.
- You’ll be able to find a job anywhere you want to live.
From the inner city to luxury suburbs, every community needs nurses. Whatever your ideal setting is, chances are good that the community will welcome you with a job and open arms. You can even choose to travel while you work – there are nursing jobs in the hospitality industry, including nursing jobs on cruise ships and in resort towns. Want to spend the winter in Fort Lauderdale and the summers on the shores of the Great Lakes? That’s doable, too. There are agencies that specialize in temp jobs for nurses in high demand cities. When you have a nursing degree, you can choose where you want to live and know that there will be a job.
- Nurses with degrees can command higher salaries.
Nurses with an advanced degree can earn, on average, 25% to 50% more than non-degreed nurses, even in the same position. In addition, a nursing degree is a requirement for some of the highest paying jobs in nursing. Those jobs include head nurse and management jobs, jobs in hospital, nursing home and clinic management, industrial nursing jobs and nursing jobs in city, state and federal Public Health departments.
- A nursing degree gives you more career choices.
Specialization is becoming the norm in all fields these days, but especially so in medicine. Advanced nursing degrees often offer you the opportunity to acquire specialized knowledge in a particular nursing field. That specialized depth of knowledge will allow you to work in higher paying jobs that have more of an effect on the world of medicine and on the patients with whom you work.
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