Be innovative - leverage your experience
Feel like you're not capitalizing on your experience quite as much as you would like? Here are three important and fulfilling ways you can share your experience with others, and leverage your expertise to the fullest.
- Be a nurse leader
- Be a mentor
- Becoming a nurse teacher
Becoming a nursing teacher
If you are a nurse, you know just how much of your job involves teaching. Whether you are showing patients or clients how to care for themselves, or giving leadership to new nurses you are working with, teaching is part of the job. If you’ve ever contemplated more focused, structured teaching, becoming a nurse educator in a classroom setting might be the perfect change for you. The nursing profession is in dire need of nurse teachers to inspire and educate new nurses. Teaching nursing can be quite a surprising and rewarding change from clinical practice. What would the role be like?
- Students will look to you to show them how to be a nurse in a wide range of areas, including physical assessments.
- In order to advise students you will need to stay current with new technology and techniques, conduct research and produce scholarship.
- You may be expected to play a role in raising funding for school programs.
- With the rise in distance learning, you may be doing some teaching and tests in an online classroom setting.
To become a nursing educator you must be a registered nurse (RN) and have a Master’s Degree in Nursing to teach undergraduate students and help them become RNs, or a Doctoral Degree to teach masters and doctoral level students. (Find out how to advance your education on our Nursing Education Guide.) You must also have training and experience in a clinical specialty. As a nurse educator working in a classroom setting, you are encouraged to combined teaching with continuing patient care.
Just one of the perks of being a nurse educator in a classroom is independence. You make many of your own decisions, plus you have the chance to change people’s lives with education as well as advance health care.
To learn more: