How to Achieve Your Nursing Career Goals in 2018
By Kristy Snyder, Contributor
It’s important to have nursing career goals to guide your job performance. Career goals can keep you focused, find your niche, and forge new relationships with your coworkers.
Whether your nurse career goals for 2018 are to get a promotion, travel more or increase the quality of your patient care, use the following tips to help achieve them.
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Spell It Out
Whether your nursing career goals are focused on taking the next step in your career or learning the latest techniques to improve patient care - remember the importance of realistic measurements of success.
Try to look at your nurse career goals and bucket them in these five ways:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Realistic
- Time-based
These five characteristics create the acronym “S.M.A.R.T” - can your goals align with them?
Can you be as specific as possible, so that all your goals can be measured and attained in a realistic time frame? While this exercise may seem like work, it will provide you with the clarity you need to take the first steps toward achieving your goals.
Also, write your goals down and keep them in a planner or on a sticky note at your home. Visual reminders will help you stay focused on what matters the most!
Continue Your Education
Is one of your goal related to get a promotion? If so, you might want to consider getting your BSN. Not only has this become an industry standard, but the Institute of Medicine predicted a goal of having 80 percent of nurses achieve a BSN by 2020.
RELATED: Is It Worth Getting a BSN?
If one of your goals is to switch specialties, you may want to into continuing education classes. Perhaps you’re trying to transition into mental health nursing. If so, take all the continuing education classes you can find on addiction, mental disorders, and more for example.
Consider Travel Nursing
Travel nursing is another career option that can propel you into another role, facility and learning environment relatively quickly. Travel nurses fill staffing gaps at hospitals and facilities for periods of eight to 13-weeks to longer, interacting with patients in the same way as the facility’s permanent staff.
They can work in a variety of settings, such as hospitals, private practices, clinics and other healthcare facilities. Learn more about the multitude of nurse career benefits, here.
Evaluate How It’s Going
Set a check-in timeline to stop and access how close you are to where you thought you'd be, or want to be toward your career goals.
Consider how far you’ve come since the beginning of you setting your goals. How much further do you still have to go? If you haven’t made it as far as you wanted, what (if anything) has held you back?
You might even want to keep a journal of your progress to make it easier to track.
2018 is a new year, so don’t let anything hold you back from your nurse career goals.