Certification after school

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Is it a good idea to obtain specialty certification right after graduating nursing school. I dont know what I want to work in but I thought it might not hurt when looking for a job.

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Specializes in Psych ICU, addictions.

(duplicate post)

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Specializes in Psych ICU, addictions.
Is it a good idea to obtain specialty certification right after graduating nursing school. I dont know what I want to work in but I thought it might not hurt when looking for a job.

If you mean specialty nursing certification like ANCC, CCRN, CEN, you can't. Specialty certification require experience as a RN, plus a set number of hours (2000-3000 or more) of work in the specialty area, plus a whole lot of CEUs in the specialty area. And then you get to take a lovely exam on top of all of that.

If you mean general certifications like ACLS, PALS, EKG, IV, NRP, etc...that you can do right out of the gate.

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most nursing specialty certifications require a lot of practice time as an rn in the specialty area, which makes sense if you look at specialty certification as evidence of expertise that a new grad is not going to have yet. some require bsn, too.

google "nursing specialty certifications" and check out the abns and ancc lists. wander around in there and see what piques your interest. you never know what you might want to do!

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Specializes in NICU, PICU, PACU.

Ditto, you can't do a specialy exam without the documented hours of practice. I would caution against getting the other certs such as NRP, etc because you really do need to be in practice to be able to apply them and most places have those in place during their orientation. As a person who interviews on our unit, I would not take into consideration that you have NRP because you don't have the knowledge base to use it appropriately.

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