How To Show You’re Ready For A Promotion In Your Nursing Career

If you are a nurse, you’ll have a number of different options open to you regarding your future. You can stay at the level you’re at now, you can change careers, or you can look for opportunities to get ahead in what you’re doing now and opt for promotion. This last idea may be the hardest yet most rewarding of all the options. When you work towards a promotion, you’ll be putting in more hours, going above and beyond, and thinking of the best ways to present yourself.

Ideally, you’ll want this to work out, but this is not always what happens. Sometimes, no matter what you might think, your boss simply doesn’t feel you’re ready for a promotion. So, of course, the best thing you can do is show them that you are ready. Here are some of the best ways you can do it and help yourself get ahead in your nursing career at the same time.

Create A Career Plan

The best thing you can do when you’re considering how best to prove you’re ready for a promotion is to create a career plan. This should be something you write down, not just an idea kept in your head, because this is what will help you at every step of your nursing career, and you will need to refer to it often and make changes when necessary.

To begin with, think about where you are right now. What is the next level you wish to reach? Once you know that, you need to think about how you’re going to get there. It might be that you need additional qualifications, more experience, or that you need to learn more about the job itself. Don’t just write down anything that comes to mind and that seems right; this won’t help you. Instead, you’ll need to carry out real research into exactly what is required. Not only will this enable you to make the right choices so that you stay on your chosen career path, but it will also show you whether the path is the right one, to begin with. For example, it might be that you realize you’ve been aiming for something that isn’t really going to suit you at all.

Continue working through all the levels you’ll need to go through to reach your ultimate goal. By the end, you’ll have a complete career plan that you can follow step by step. In addition, this will prove to managers that you do have what it takes to be promoted since you have clearly researched everything thoroughly.

Enjoy Your Job

If you want to get a promotion, it’s absolutely essential that you enjoy the work you’re doing now. If you feel that being promoted will get you out of a situation in which you don’t like what you’re currently doing, and you hope that the next step up will improve how you feel, this is a bad idea all around.

To begin with, adding more responsibility to a job you already dislike is never going to make things better – you’ll be even more stressed than you are now. Secondly, if your boss is aware that you’re not enjoying what you’re doing (and this will be rather hard to hide), they will not be happy about giving you a promotion. Instead, they will want to give the job to someone who really does love their work and will therefore do more and achieve more because of it.

Remember, if you don’t like your work, it’s going to show. You might be distant with colleagues, brusque with patients, you might always rush off at the end of your shift and never agree to cover someone else’s shift if required. The people who are kind to patients, work well in a team, and put in the extra effort are the ones who are most ready for a promotion, and these are the people who love their work.

Think carefully about whether you really want to continue in the field of nursing. It’s not easy, and it’s not something everyone can do. However, if you need to change careers to something else, no one will think any less of you, and you could be a lot happier, enabling you to move forward in your new career much more easily than you tried to do in nursing.

Keep Learning

In some cases, you will need to gain an additional qualifications and more experience in order to progress. That’s why, if you want a promotion, you should look into an RN to MSN Family Nurse Practitioner Program, which will help you move to the next level; it’s certainly something any employer is going to want to see if you are applying for the promotion they’re offering.

However, even if you aren’t applying for a promotion right now, and even if you already have any qualifications you’re going to need to make your next step, you should continue to learn. Nursing is the kind of career that is always evolving, and new ideas and innovations are being brought in at all times. If you can stay abreast of these changes and especially if you can be a useful resource for your colleagues, letting them know of anything they might have missed, this will not go unnoticed. When you find you are ready to apply for a promotion, the fact that you continue to learn as much as possible about your chosen career and that you put those new ideas into practice will mean a lot. This is yet another way to show someone that you are certainly ready for a promotion.

Be A Team Player

As we’ve said, it’s crucial that you are able to get on well with your colleagues, but it’s about so much more than that in reality. Enjoying their company is one thing; being a valued team player is another, and it’s this latter that you need to focus on when you want to show you are ready for a promotion.

It’s true that, generally, the higher you are promoted, the more you will be in charge of people rather than working on the same level as them, but far from meaning that teamwork is not important, it’s the complete opposite. You will need to know how a team works well together in order to get the best out of the people under you. You’ll also need to know the people individually to ensure they are all working to their strengths. Plus, if they know you and consider you to be part of the team, they will be more likely to do as you ask them to, even if you’re now their superior.

Therefore, showing that you are a team player is a lot more important than you might think when it comes to proving you’ve got what it takes to apply for a promotion in your nursing career.

Offer Solutions

Nursing is full of challenges; they really are at the core of everything that happens, and even a seemingly ‘simple’ day can still be fraught with important decisions and obstacles to be overcome.

This is why solutions are so important. Many people – including nurses, too – will look at a problem and focus on the issue. What they won’t do is look for a solution. If you can be different and offer solutions to the challenges in front of you rather than just complaining because the challenge is there, or going about things the same way as usual even if it’s been proven not to work or not be efficient, then you are effectively showing that you are ready to take on the responsibilities that come with gaining a promotion. When you are promoted, you will be expected to come up with solutions. If you are doing that already, it makes sense to give you the job that suits you.

Tell Them You’re Ready

Your boss is a busy person. They aren’t going to be watching every single nurse under them like a hawk at all times, so although they might take note of some exceptional things you’re doing, especially at review time, sometimes the best thing you can do if you want a promotion is to tell them you’re ready for the additional work and responsibilities.

Make an appointment to speak with your manager and talk to them about your plans for the future. You could even show them your career plan, or at least talk them through it, so they know what you want to do. This can be useful in a number of different ways, including the fact that you can obtain some excellent advice at this stage – you might even find out exactly what it is your manager would need to see from you to be able to offer you the promotion you want. In this way, you can get to work on ensuring those things are in place before the application date or the deadline given to you.

Even if this is not the case, the very fact that you are letting your employer know you are ready and then giving them the evidence to prove this is the case could be enough. At the very least, they will watch you more closely to see if you really are as prepared as you say you are, and it could be that they will be glad to offer you the promotion; they just hadn’t realized you wanted it before.

How To Show You’re Ready For A Promotion In Your Nursing Career

Newer Articles

Older Articles