06// Nursing Career Goals: Charting Your Path to Success

There is a lack of clarity when it comes to nursing career goals. The majority of nurses know what they want to do when they join the nursing profession. However, for some, their thoughts about what they want to do begin to change after they've been in the profession for a while. Exposure to more influences their desire to follow a different path. Often, they don't know what that path will be.  It is my goal to make you feel like you can make a difference in your career and have the power to navigate further. 

During this episode, we provide good examples of nursing career goals and offer practical guidance on how to set achievable goals that can make a significant difference in your nursing career. By the end of the episode, you'll have gained valuable insights into the importance of setting career goals and feel empowered to take control of your nursing career.

As a nurse, it's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day tasks and responsibilities of the job. However, it's important to take a step back and think about your long-term career goals. 

Whether you're just starting or have been in the profession for a while, this podcast offers useful tips and advice to help you reach your full potential as a nurse. Don't let your career plateau, set clear goals and watch yourself grow as a nurse. Tune in to this episode to learn more about the importance of nursing career goals.

Transcript

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Welcome to The Ambitious Nurse Podcast, where I provide tips, tools, and resources for the experienced nurse to put in your career bag to help you be a better person, a better leader, a better professional, and most of all, a better nurse. I'm your host, Bonnie Meadows, a career coach, and a Clinical Nurse Specialist with over 18 years of experience in healthcare and nursing. It's my passion to help experienced nurses develop their careers to impact healthcare and their communities. Hello everyone. It is good to be back, Thank you for allowing me to step into your world, to have the opportunity to just share what's on my mind and really just be able to help you to advance in your career. That is my whole goal with this podcast. So today I am talking about career goals As nurses, especially as ambitious nurses, we do think about what do we want to do next. Sometimes that next is kind of like a ceiling. Sometimes we have an ultimate goal and it doesn't turn out to be what we think that it should be or what we hoped that it should be. And I'm not talking about it in a bad way. I'm talking about even in a good way. I've talked to several nurses, coached several nurses recently, or either those within my circle who are fellow ambitious nurses and many of them their career trajectory has totally changed since they've come into nursing or they got to a certain level and they're like, well, this is not what I wanted. So that is for another conversation. However, I want to encourage you that it is important to have a vision as a nurse and to know where you want to go, and sometimes it's not necessarily where you end up, but what's important is that you're making an impact and you are working in what they call your zone of genius. You've found your niche and once you get into that space, you're now able to work optimally and you are able to figure out what matters and what doesn't matter. You're able to stay in your job longer because you now have an understanding that there will be those work things they just come to be. It is what it is as this is what we will always see. Prime example, politics within the workplace, and as long as they are not hindering you or someone else because sometimes it's just a leadership style of someone, or it's just the culture of that area. You then now have to figure out, okay, well I like the job, but do I like the people? How does this work for my family? There's just all kinds of questions that come into that; so that's not really where I'm going with this podcast either, but I'm really here just to help you to understand what a career goal is. How do you obtain your career goals? How do you figure out what is your career goal and what does that look like from a nursing standpoint? I had a nurse manager one time I was an educator and I was working with the educators and the nurse manager said to the bedside nurses, the educators, she said, I want everyone to set smart goals. The bedside nurse said, what is that? That's the answer that I would actually expect from most bedside nurses, even from those who may be ambitious. Everyone's not ambitious. They want career advancement in different ways, or some people just don't want to advance. I know that goals are important. That's what we learned in nursing school. Most of the goals, discussions though, were centered around patients. So now I am centering the goals discussion around your career, They have generalized goals. When I came into nursing, I said, ah, I have a goal to stay at the bedside for about seven, eight years, no longer than 10. My goal was to not stay at the bedside. It was not to be a lifelong bedside nurse. Let's be clear, I have no problems with that. We need lifelong bedside nurses, but that was not my calling So in this episode, you'll learn why career goals are essential to your nursing career. You'll walk away knowing what good examples of career goals are and how to set them for your career. Every person should have at least one short-term career goal, and one long-term career goal at all times of their careers. I want you to feel like you can make a difference in your career and feel like you have the power to navigate further in your career. So why are career goals important? Accomplishing goals helps you to build confidence for one. So as you set goals and you achieve them, then that builds the confidence for you to do more to set the next goal. Now, sometimes the higher you go, especially when we're setting goals for patients and you know, you worked hard to get to that goal and somebody moves the goal post and they're like, oh, well if you met this goal, you can do a little bit better, and you're like, Uhuh, we just wanna sustain for right now, but that gives you the confidence as long as you do it the right way, as long as you don't nickel and dime your way to making your career goal, then it will help you to build confidence to do more. For example, just in me, it was my goal within my profession, my state nurses association to be able have a seat on the Board of Directors. Well, I accomplished that goal. I actually went back and looked at it. I set that goal back in 2016 when I was a part of the North Carolina Nurses Association Leadership Academy. That was my goal to be on the Board of Directors for the nursing association I've met that goal. That's where I currently am, and now it's time for me to set the bar a little higher. What will I do next? We shall see. It allows you to distinguish yourself as a nursing professional. It helps you to remember that you're not just coming to work just to do your job and go home. You're coming to work because you have a goal. You have a career goal. You have a goal to take care of your patients. You have a goal to make an impact. So it allows you to do that, and then it gives you a different perspective on your career because it forces you to think outside of the linear trajectory of your career or helps you to think outside of when you come into nursing school. And this is just how I think, I'm not sure if other nurses think like this I'm assuming other ambitious nurses think the same way. Okay. I come in to nursing. I worked the bedside for several years, get some good clinical experience under my belt, and then after that I go back and I get my master's degree and possibly my doctorate degree, and somewhere up in there, I wanna be a nurse practitioner or I wanna be a CRNA, or I wanna be a nurse manager, or I want to be something else that I've seen. That's the linear path that you see when you come in. But for me and other nurses that I've talked to, and even when I had gotten to the point where I was at my seven years and I said, okay, it's time to move on. I had a broad goal of I want to learn more about the hospital business. I knew by then that I loved quality. I wanted to do more work in quality improvement, but what did that look like? However, I had a goal. So even if my career goal at that point in time was I like hospital quality and I wanna dig more into that to figure out where I want to go next, that is why those goals are important. To help to give you a different perspective on your career so that you don't always feel like you're stuck. There are plenty of options out there for nurses, and you will hear me say that over and over and over again. There are jobs being created all the time. I don't wanna say daily because I don't know how true that is, but all the time that you have the qualifications to walk into as a nurse going for their graduate degree or already has their graduate degree. And here's something that you will always hear me say- the higher you go with your degrees, more options. Why get a bachelor's degree? More options. Why get a master's degree? More options. So if you decide, okay, well I just wanna go and get my nurse practitioner, then you get halfway through nurse practitioner school and you're like, I don't want this. Guess what? You still have a master's degree and you can still do something else. Doctorate degree? More options So just understand that this is why career goals are important. Just gonna throw something else out here for you, and it's the nursing code of ethics provision number five. Yes. I brought out the nursing code of ethics. There's a whole lot of flavor in the nursing code of ethics. It really guides you in your nursing career. Now, I don't sit down and read it as if it's the Bible, but I reference it a lot as I am digging into my career coaching career and helping to understand how I need to guide other nurses, because a lot of it is either what I've experienced or as I reflect it comes to me. And so then I reference the code of ethics to see if my thinking is lining up with what I read. So here's the nursing code of ethics provision number five, that relates to career goals. Here's what you, the nurse owes the same duties to self as to others, so let's stop there. If we're expecting the patients to do certain things, then we need to be doing the same thing. If we're expecting the patients to hold themselves accountable to educate themselves, then we need to be doing the same thing. Okay. That was a sidebar. The nurse owes the same duties to self as to others, including the responsibility to promote health and safety, preserve wholeness of character and integrity, maintain competence, and continue personal and professional growth. Now, nobody said you had to be the CNE, but you need to have continued professional growth. Nurses must maintain competence and strive for excellence in their nursing practice. Is that what you do on a daily basis? Whatever role or setting- to maintain competence and continue in personal and professional growth requires a commitment to lifelong learning to include continuing education, networking with professional colleagues, professional reading, specialty certifications, and seeking advanced degrees. This level of competence affects not only the quality of care rendered, but also one's self-respect, self-esteem, and the meaningfulness of work, meaning If you do all these things to maintain confidence and continue in your personal and professional growth, you will have an increased self-respect. You will have an increased self-esteem, and you will have a meaningfulness to your work. I e you won't feel like you're stuck. All right, so next, let's talk about some examples to some good nursing career goals. Getting specialty certification. We just talked about that in the nursing code of ethics. Reading books to improve your communication skills listening to videos, listening to podcasts on how to improve your communication skills. Developing leadership skills, and that would mean seeking opportunities for leadership classes, reading books on leadership. I have an example of that. When I was preparing to leave the bedside, I actually did go and visit. a career coach. It was suggested to me by one of my colleagues. We didn't really call her a career coach at that point in time, but I pretty much said to her, I wanna do something different. And she said, well, why don't you go and talk to such and such? And so when I went and sat down with her, she said, well, what do you want to do? And I said, well, I wanna be in leadership I love leadership, y'all. I do. I really love leadership, but I love leadership from an influence standpoint and not from an operations standpoint. And I will have another podcast later on just talking about the difference. she said, well, are you reading any leadership books? Good question. No, I wasn't. So she was let me suggest one to you. And the book that she suggested in 2011 was Leadership Gold by John Maxwell. It was a phenomenal book. I actually still have it here on my bookshelf probably need to reread it. but I've been listening and reading his 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. John Maxwell is a phenomenal leadership teacher, and the one thing that he will say is leadership is influence. And if you don't have influence, then you're not a leader. And I 100% agree with that because I've been in leadership positions and not in operations positions Within nursing, that can be looked at as, well you don't have any management experience. Okay, well that's fine, but guess what you have to do as a manager, just like you have corral people as a leader, you have to corral people as a manager So what you're really saying to me is I don't have experience disciplining people and going through the HR process, and possibly managing a budget. But guess what? I learned that in my first master's degree program. Now do I have extensive experience with it? No, but you just want somebody who's been working like working with HR So I said all of that to say, develop your leadership skills. That could be a goal. If you're wanting to be a leader, then work on developing your leadership skills. Get an advanced degree. That's an example of a goal. Of course, it's a common example, but that's an example. When I first started this business and my podcast journey, I was speaking to all experienced nurses, but I kept saying, I want the experienced nurse. I don't want the nurse who's just looking for how do I get my next job. Truth be told, any of us can get a job as a nurse. It's out there. The harvest is plenty. The workers are few. I want to coach the nurse who knows that this is bigger than them and they want to make an impact. Yeah, they wanna make money, but they wanna make strategic moves in their careers so that they can make an impact and be open to whatever and wherever they go, as long as they have a compass of what those roles need to have. So I've now since changed my position and not necessarily change my position, but I'm now going deeper. And this podcast will now be focused on nurses who want a graduate degree or who already have a graduate degree. And I mainly say that because I have two graduate degrees, two masters in nursing, always open to going back and get a doctorate degree. But those who I help the most, I can help you make a lateral position with a bachelor's of nursing, because I've been there. But I can also help the graduate nurse, or the nurse who is pursuing a graduate degree to understand what degree is best based on their zone of genius, what they've learned in their nursing career and in their healthcare career that they do well and they like doing. Regardless of whether it's something that they've already done or something that they've seen somebody do and they thought, huh, I'd like to do that. Most of the nurses who come to me for coaching, they have master's degrees or they're nurses with a bachelor's degree who are looking for their next and usually their next is I want to go back and get a graduate degree. But what? So getting an advanced degree can definitely be a career goal. Having a balance between life and work is actually a career goal. It's a career goal. And what does that look like? It is, I wanna go deep, not wide. I don't wanna spread myself too thin. I wanna have a balance between work and home, and I just want to grow in where I am and my specialty and be a speaker or do podium presentations or poster presentations, yet having a balance between life and work. So that's a goal. I was talking to a, coaching client of mine and she has her doctorate degree. And she came to me and she said, I wanna do something different. So then I go through my set of questions that I usually go through, and it depends on the answers that people give me. But then from there, we discovered she loves the work that she does, but it wasn't providing the work-life balance that she needed. So the advice that I gave to her is, now time for you to talk to your boss. You don't have a dog in the fight if you don't talk to your boss, have a conversation with them to give them the opportunity to say, no, I can't lighten your workload, or, yes, I can. But when you have that conversation, you gotta be ready for whatever way it swings and not be disappointed. So she went and had a conversation with her boss. Her boss said yes because she values her. She knows that she's not gonna take advantage of a reduced workload, and she knows that she would get a better product out of her if she meets her needs. So it is load to have a good balance between life and work and to have a reduced load so you can go deep and not be spread thin wide. Getting involved in professional organizations, that could be a career goal. I told you it was my career goal. It was one of my career goals to be on the board of directors, and so now I'm all in. Like I was all in before, but now I'm all in. I've been a part of the North Carolina Nurses Association since 2012, and I'm pretty much just going to be a member from here on out, dedicating my time to the organization because I have joy when I am able to put forth my contribution to the entire nursing profession. So that can be a career goal. Becoming a subject matter expert or specializing. We actually can't take this for granted. Many of us, we work in a specific area of specialty for about three or four years, maybe five or six, and then we totally switch to something else. And I would encourage you before you switch to something else, especially if you are in a specialty where there's not a lot of resources or not a lot nursing presence. For example, cardiovascular nursing specialty- within where I work, it's very heavily provider-based. That's fine. It's been that way for a long time But as we grow, they're finding, okay, we need the voice that will corral all the other cardiac nurses because the cardiac nursing practice needs to be evaluated also. So because they needed a subject matter expert in that area, and I have a master's degree and I was in a position where I was helping to make those decisions and I became a clinical nurse specialist, then here we go. Now I become one of the go-to people to speak for nursing practice. Now I'll speak for myself. All of my colleagues will tell you I do not speak for all things nursing. I go back to them and I say, is this right? What are you doing? Here's what the evidence says. I do all of that, but it is important to think about having a career goal, to be a subject matter expert and to specialize. Being the go-to person for that thing is actually not a bad goal. It's a great goal. Sometimes we don't stay in it long enough though, for it to be our goal. It wasn't until I left, went to other positions, and then in those positions realizing that me having a cardiac surgery specialty as a nurse was far and between to come by and so then I started to use it for my advantage. Getting involved in community efforts and city and county boards. So I learned a lot about this when I was in the Leadership Academy for the North Carolina Nurses Association about the importance of just being involved in boards and there's an initiative with the future of Nursing Action Coalition where they talk about the importance of nursing being on boards because we just have a unique perspective and especially when it comes to our communities and our cities and our counties and the boards that are within those areas. Yes, they have boards. They have a park and recreation board, a transportation board, they have all kinds of boards, and you don't have to be on the city council to be effective and to make an impact in your city and your county. In nursing, our curriculum prepares us to treat the whole patient, so our approach focuses on holistic health, knowing that every person's aspect of their life affects their wellbeing. Affects what they would call health. You know, the environment, the patient, health. Most of the theorists, they talk about that. Yes, y'all, I'm bringing out nursing theory. I'm just bringing it all full circle. As nurses, we have a unique view of how to improve our communities, counties, our cities, based on that word environment and how it affects the patient population. It's our unique perspective that makes us equipped participate on our community boards, and so I would challenge you if you don't have a desire to get involved on anything in healthcare, then one of your career goals really could be getting involved in your community. It could be to continue your education without getting another degree/ certifications. This goes along with being a subject matter expert, getting a certification and then just continuously learning about different things. You say, okay, well I wanna learn about leadership, so I'm gonna set a goal to read this many books on leadership. I wanna learn about communication, so I'm gonna find a conference on how to communicate better. And you can set that as a goal. You can become an advocate for nursing and patients, which means getting involved in the legislative process. I didn't know how much our profession relied so much on the legislative process. Staffing, legislative process; how many visitors we have, legislative process, believe it or not; insurance, legislative process. Can you as a nurse practitioner prescribe or have a supervising physician, legislative process. There's a whole lot that they have power over. And that has become now my lifelong mission, one of them, you know, I got several, but now that I've come into this knowledge, I have decided that I want to be a voice at the table to help nurses understand the power that they have in the legislative process and how they can advocate for nurses and patients within the legislative process. These people are elected officials who might have been a real estate agent or you might have been a pharmacist, or you own a farm, or you own your own business, or you worked in corporate America at a financial institute. They don't know anything about healthcare. They're only going by the lobbyists, and the policy makers that they interact with. Now, don't get it twisted. All lobbyists are not bad. Every nursing organization has a lobbyist working for them, to try to make an impact on the legislative process and to have a voice at the table so that they're not making decisions for nursing. Again, when I was in the leadership academy with North Carolina Nurses Association, they had a lobbyist come and talk to us because we were learning about the legislative process. And one of the things that she said that really stuck to me was they have no idea what you do if you do nothing else. Your purpose should be to educate them on what you do. Period. Point blank. Well, and vote You can start small by voting, reaching out to them saying, Hey, I'm a nurse in your area. and just let me know if you need anything or I'm a nurse working in this particular specialty. I know you have concern about our patients just like I do. You want the optimal care for our patients just like I do. Let me know if you have any questions about any work that we do in the hospital. Just that easy to let them know that you're available. You want to provide them with education about what we do so that they can make appropriate decisions where they are regardless of the party. So with that being said, as I'm talking about these things, your career goals should always be structured as smart goals. Smart is specific, attainable, achievable, R is for relevant, and T is for timely. An example of specific would be, I wanna get my education. Okay, well, in what? Which one? What's attainable? Sticking with the same thing. Oh, I wanna get my certification in cardiac medicine with the A C N. Okay, well you work on a cardiac step down unit, cardiac telemetry unit. Okay. Well that would mean you need to go and work in the I C U or you could go for your C V R N certification. So that's attainable for you. It's relevant. Now, timely would be by third quarter of 2023. So that would be a short sentence. I would like to get my certification in cardiovascular nursing by third quarter of 2022, October of 2023. So now that we've gone through all of this, of how it should be structured, what are some examples of career goals, why it's important, then we need to determine what are your career goals? So how do we do that? I have a few suggestions of some things that you can reflect on to think about how to determine your career goals. If you're feeling stuck, you have the answer within you. You may be in denial of what your career goal is. You may have said it to someone and they told you, I don't see you doing that. Or why would you want to do that? It's within you though. So how do you determine your own career goals? Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Do you need more time? Is money a factor? Is time a factor? Is home a factor? If all of that is settled, or if there's one of those things in there that is like, uh, well this is an issue. Uh, well that is an issue... then you work around that and maybe your career goals are just a little bit more bite size than just going straight to the mark. You work around that. What interests you? Just write it down, reflect, think about those things really perk your interests as a nurse or what you saw. And if you're reflecting, you can't think of anything, start to look, start to notice. Take the time for the next three to four months to really start to look around and see if there is something that you do see. Look in journal articles nursing magazines to see if there's something that perks your interest. You determine your career goals based on your work setting too. What's going on in your work setting? Is there a project that you would like to work on, or an area that you'd like to get more experience in? What are your ambitions, your aspirations? What's your big goal in life? You need to take bite-sized steps to get there, and then just remembering that at any point in time, you should have no more than three to four goals to work towards at once. Otherwise, you're spreading yourself too thin. Once you set those goals, then it's the habits and the systems that you develop and put in place to then achieve your goals. So you put a system, a routine in place, and then you attach a habit to that system, a routine that will help you to get to your goal. Lastly, I wanna leave you with this quote from James Clear. He is the author of Atomic Habits. I love that book. Life Changing. He says, five years is a long time. It's much slower than most of us would like. If you accept the reality of slow progress, you have every reason to take action today. If you resist the reality of slow progress five years from now, you'll simply be five years older and still looking for a shortcut. Keep that in mind. When you don't have a goal, you end up in a job longer than you should, feeling miserable and stuck because you don't have a plan. It makes you a better person and it does not help the work culture. I hope this episode was very helpful for you in understanding your career goals, where you should start, or maybe some of you have had career goals and you now need to evaluate what your next step is. I've had to reevaluate my career goals several times in my career as an ambitious nurse because what I thought was the goal really wasn't the goal. And guess what? That's okay. It's about making progress. It's not perfection. And at the end of the day, you want to make an impact. That is the goal. So however it works out, and as long as it's something that you enjoy, then if there's a hiccup here or there, if there's a reroute here or there, it's just because you weren't supposed to go down that route. And it's okay because whatever is the hiccup is just not for you, but whatever else is around the corner, it's for you. So I hope this was encouraging for you. I try my best not to be a Debbie Downer or a hand slapper, but I wanna encourage you and empower you to take ownership of your career, and don't let life happen to you, but you make life happen within the fines of what is in your control. Thanks for joining us this week on the ambitious nurse podcast. To review the show notes and any links mentioned in today's episode, please go to the ambitious nurse podcast.com. You can download my nurse starter growth guide. If you want more information about how to take the next step in your career. It walks you through five steps you should think through to start working towards growing your career. Download the nurse starter growth guide at the link shown in the show notes. If you're enjoying this conversation, follow or subscribe so you don't miss a future episode. Also, please consider leaving a rating, review and or comment about what you want to hear about. This helps more nurses, just like you find this podcast. And remember you don't have to grow your career alone; as iron sharpens, iron one person sharpens another. Thank you for letting me sharpen you as you take this knowledge to sharpen the next. Thanks again for joining me, Bonnie Meadows on the ambitious nurse podcast. We look forward to chatting with you the next time.