The future seems bright for registered nurses with all the monetary benefits coming their way. But as trite as it may sound, money is not the only reason why students don the nursing cap and decide to care for other people for the rest of their lives. After all, choosing a career based on money alone might only leave you empty and miserable.
So what really keeps a nurse from giving up her ‘vocation’ and calling it quits?
Unless you took up Nursing for all the wrong reasons, you’d agree that nurses look beyond their huge paychecks to stay on their jobs.
Here are some of the awesome job perks that make you fall in love more with your chosen profession:
Action-packed moments
Depending on your Nursing specialty, boredom may now be a thing of the past.
If you love the feel of an adrenaline rush, you’ll never go wrong with all the action-packed moments that Nursing has to offer. You may not exactly experience what we see on TV but there will really come a time when your wits and expertise are challenged.
From natural disaster to all sorts of emergency crises, the Nursing profession offers plenty of scenarios to challenge you physically, emotionally, intellectually, and even spiritually. Love Nursing and you’re in for a great, thrilling ride of a lifetime.
Job security
Nurses enjoy a variety of opportunities even during the most bleak of circumstances. In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported an increased demand in health care jobs during the recession. Since then, job outlook for nurses have been very positive, with more than 500,000 U.S. jobs to be created by the year 2018.
As long as you keep your passion burning and don’t stay at home after getting laid off, opportunities will always come knocking at your door.
Plenty of career choices
You’ll never get bored as a nurse, especially if you open yourself up to all career possibilities that may come your way.
In fact, with the educational and training assistance from your employer, you can easily transition from one Nursing specialty to another without compromising your career growth.
Some nurses, for instance, have already tried to work as an inpatient nurse, law practitioner and even as a self-employed nurse during the span of their careers.
Social Impact
It’s great to work in an industry where your sacrifices are never taken for granted. Even better if you see your efforts being translated into patients getting better and their families being thankful for what you’ve done.
Nursing is an art but unlike others, it is not a thankless job.
Nurses are able to keep their motivation intact because they know that sooner or later, their caring hands will be able to touch lives and make a difference to the society as a whole. This overwhelming amount of social impact is priceless and one of the reasons why nurses are thankful they have the job.
Professional growth is inevitable
For nurses, learning is a never-ending journey. To keep their skills and knowledge at par, they exert all the effort to learn as much as they can even after graduation. Learning, after all, is what makes them useful and keeps their patients away from harm.
From attending conferences to enrolling at a graduate school, there are plenty of ways to keep knowledge-loving nurses abreast with the current Nursing trends.
You’ll never go stagnant if you’re a nurse and just when you thought you know it all, there are still wonderful opportunities waiting for you to explore.
High pay
Without a doubt, nurses are among the highest-paid professionals in the health care industry. Average salary according to BLS is $67,720, although it may vary depending on one’s location and Nursing specialty.
For example, certified nurse anesthetists (CRNAs) have been named as as one of the 20 highest-paid workers in the US by CNN in 2010.
You can be someone else’s hero
Nurses get the chance to be a hero day in and day out. In fact, they call it a job to save someone in danger.
Be it a random guy in dire need of a CPR or a friend choking and badly need a Heimlich maneuver, nurses can easily switch roles to keep someone out of harm’s way.
Nurses are trained to save and the fulfillment they get from doing so will stay with them for the rest of their lives.
It’s fulfilling!
True nurses are those who entered the profession with their passion to serve others as their motivation. If you keep this mindset intact and your expectations lower, you’ll soon discover that Nursing is indeed not all about monetary compensation.
Remember, you’re not just making a living, but also making a LIFE. And that is the reason why nurses, despite all circumstances, keep their heads held high and firmly believe that at the end of the day, Nursing is still one of the best jobs in the world!
Your Turn
What do you love about being a nurse? Feel free to share with us what job perk that keeps you sane and always motivated at work.
Featured image courtesy of: Flickr
