Re: Seeking non-clinical nursing position
I suggest you do a thorough self-assessment of your qualifications and compare those qualifications to the types of jobs in which you are interested.
Then make a career plan for yourself.
For example, if you want to be a nursing instructor at a college, you will probably need a Master's Degree plus a few year's of clinical experience in the area in which you want to teach. If you want to teach LPN's or in some ADN programs, an MSN may not be required -- but you will probably need more than 1 year of experience. At the 1-yr experience mark, nurses are just reaching the stage of basic competence and are ususally not ready to teach.
If you want to focus on research, then get the certifications (and experience) that will help you land one of those jobs. etc. etc. etc.
Buy a book or two on nursing careers (do a search on Amazon.com) and read about the types of careers available and what the qualifications are.
Make an appointment with a Nurse Recruiter or nursing leader to conduct an "informational interview" not a "job interview" to learn about the different career paths and qualifications they are aware of. Tell them that you are new to the area and are trying to do some long-term career planning and would like to learn about the various career paths available there.
Lurk on this board for a while. Look at some of the jobs people talk about and the paths their careers took to get that job. If you don't understand something or find a particular job interesting, ask that person a little more about it.
Use the basic problem-solving/nusing process .... assess ... plan ... intervene ... evaluate.
Good luck,
llg
Nursing News