How to choose the right graduate nursing degree for your career?
When registered nurses look ahead to their next career step, they may find the options for a graduate nursing degree confusing rather than enlightening at first. Instead of just one clear option, a nurse has several options he or she could take depending on whether he or she intends to be engaged in advanced clinical practice,teaching, administrative work, or have a specialty clinical focus.
The most popular option among nurses would certainly be becoming a nurse practitioner, which offers many advantages because it provides greater autonomy in diagnosing conditions and prescribing drugs than at the RN level, which varies by the state. Nurse practitioners can specialize in many areas, such as family practice, psychiatric mental health, adult-gerontology, or pediatric primary care.
While there is a specific concentration in nursing education for nurses who may have more interest in the educational aspects of the nursing profession as opposed to direct patient care, this concentration equips the graduates with skills necessary to develop a curriculum, teach nursing courses, or train in a clinical setting. The rationale behind choosing this concentration is that there is a great need within the nursing profession since all nursing schools in the country have continually faced problems trying to find enough faculty members to produce new nursing graduates.
The nursing administration/leadership concentration is another area in the nursing profession that deals with a different type of nurse. The areas covered in such concentrations include healthcare finance, organizational leadership, quality improvement, and health policy, among others.
Clinical Nurse Specialist educational programs represent a kind of balance between a high level of clinical skills in dealing with some particular population and the focus on the quality improvement of healthcare delivery at the systems level, usually partnering with bedside clinicians to bring about evidence-based changes within the system as opposed to carrying their own workload as a nurse practitioner does.
Deciding which nursing degree one should choose is mostly about honestly understanding what part of the profession brings energy and motivation and what takes away from it. If a person enjoys working directly with the patients but hates spending time in administration meetings, then he/she should not choose a leadership path but the one that deals more with clinical practice.
Whichever path one leans toward, accreditation is worth considering because graduating from an accredited nursing education program satisfies the criteria necessary for licensure or certification examinations in that specialty. The requirement for nurse practitioners to pass a national certification exam for licensing in most states is also determined by the accreditation status of the program.
The importance of earning an advanced degree in nursing depends on matching the appropriate program and its specialization with personal career goals rather than selecting the most popular or well-paid option by default. With numerous opportunities for obtaining graduate nursing degrees currently existing, it only becomes more important to consider what work feels the most rewarding.
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