Your nursing career is yours to create, and with proper care, your path can be unique, innovative, and idiosyncratic. At the same time, your many obligations and responsibilities can steer you away from your uniqueness and leave you in a rut of choosing the path of least resistance.
There are many strategies for choosing a career journey that fits your vision of who you want to be as a healthcare professional, and it’s worth exploring those strategies for the ones that can most readily move you forward.
Thoughtfully Assess Your Career
Thoughtful questions are a good place to begin your self-assessment.
- Looking back, how and why did you make certain choices?
- Did you take a med-surg job right out of school because everyone said you should, even though it went against every fiber of your being?
- Was workplace bullying something you tolerated because you didn’t think you had another choice?
- Was your standard modus operandi to accept imperfect positions out of fear of not being offered anything better?
- Did you avoid returning to school because you heard colleagues complaining that some nurse who pursued her MSN thought she was better than everyone else?
- Are you in the wrong specialty or working with the wrong patient population?
- Would you prefer to be in an entirely non-clinical role or start your own business?
- What skills, knowledge, and experiences do you most value?
- What are your greatest gifts, and have you manifested them in your career?
Many factors can lead to poor choices; sometimes, the worst choice is doing nothing. If you’re suffering from boredom, job dissatisfaction, or burnout, you may be stuck because you haven’t had the temerity or energy to do anything about it and continue to slog through yet another day.
They say that a life well-lived is the best life of all. The most well-lived career is one where you make choices based on your deepest desires, not what professors, colleagues, family, blogs, books, and articles say. When contemplating your nursing career, is it what you want it to be?
Make a Plan
Few careers advance without effort. If you have ruby red shoes that can instantaneously transport you to the job of your dreams, that’s good for you. But for most of us mere mortals, we must do the dirty work to get there.
If you’ve asked yourself some of the aforementioned questions, perhaps you’ve realized that changes must be made to move forward with self-assurance and grace.
So how do you make a plan to move forward? Once you’ve answered the difficult questions honestly, you must face the music and proactively initiate change.
For example, let’s say you’ve spent the first eight years of your nursing career in med-surg, telemetry, and step-down, and now you realize that hospice is what you’ve always wanted but have been afraid to explore a non-acute setting.
What proactive steps can you take? You can call a friend who works in hospice and ask if you can pick her brain. You can also ask if she can introduce you to her manager to request an informational interview. You can also hop on LinkedIn and contact your area’s hospice nurses and nurse managers.
Meanwhile, you can consume journals, blogs, podcasts, and all manner of media. You might even attend a hospice conference or seminar for further research. These valuable activities may lead you to even more questions or maybe a realization that hospice isn’t a good fit.
Speaking of not being a good fit, sometimes we can reverse engineer our career reinvention by identifying what we don’t want to do and crossing those off our list. In this way, we narrow the field to what catches our attention and then dive deeper into those potential paths.
A Creative Career Trajectory
A creative and innovative approach to your nursing career is key to long-term satisfaction as a healthcare professional. We can easily fall victim to “groupthink,” the tendency to go along with the crowd and do what “everyone” seems to think is the “right” thing, even when our gut tells us otherwise.
It’s not necessarily easy to go against the grain, but many nurses have carved an idiosyncratic path, beginning with the godmother of modern nursing, the courageously innovative Florence Nightingale.
With Ms. Nightingale as your model of a nurse who didn’t flinch while carving out her journey, you can look your career square in the eye, assess who you truly want to be as a nurse, and then take thoughtful steps toward bringing that vision to fruition.
- Nurse Side Hustles: How Nurses Are Creating New Income Opportunities - April 23, 2026
- How to Become an FNP: Career Path, Requirements, and Certification - April 9, 2026
- Your Nursing Career on Your Terms - August 21, 2025