How to get a job in Psych?

[Nurse Beth, MSN]

 You are an excellent candidate with transferable skills, relevant experience, and enthusiasm.

Here are some tips on leveraging your resume, networking, and job searching:

Leverage Your Existing Pediatric Experience

• Your experience in PICU, urgent care, and school nursing gives you a solid foundation for working with children and families. Emphasize your skills with pediatric assessments, family communication, and handling children in high-stress situations.
• Crisis management. You've dealt with acute situations and stressful environments, which is crucial in psych nursing, especially when managing children in mental health crises. Highlight your ability to de-escalate crises and manage care in high-pressure environments.
• Emphasize your ability to collaborate with multidisciplinary teams, as pediatric psych requires close collaboration with psychologists, social workers, and counselors.

Expand Your Knowledge 

• Self-study. Start reading up on common pediatric psychiatric conditions like ADHD, anxiety, depression, and eating disorders. Familiarize yourself with child and adolescent mental health treatment basics, including therapies, medication management, and family dynamics.
• Courses/workshops. Look for CE courses on pediatric mental health that give you a good introductory knowledge and bolster your resume.
• Therapeutic communication. One key skill in pediatric behavioral health nursing is therapeutic communication. This includes building rapport with children and using nonjudgmental, compassionate language. Your school nursing experience gives you an excellent foundation for this, and you can build upon it by practicing how to engage with children in difficult emotional states.
• De-escalation techniques. Learn about behavioral de-escalation methods, which are used to help children manage emotional distress or aggression. Many pediatric psych facilities provide this training once you're hired, but familiarizing yourself with the basics is a significant advantage.

Seek Out Entry-Level Opportunities 

• Broaden your search. It could be a stepping stone to your goal if you are open to making your job search less specific, like behavioral health instead of pediatric behavioral health. Let's say you landed a job on an adult unit to enter the field. Within 1-2 years, you will have behavioral health and pediatric experience.

• Register on job boards like Indeed and Glassdoor, where you'll see roles for RNs transitioning into psychiatric nursing in pediatric settings. They typically highlight the importance of pediatric experience and the willingness to train in psychiatric care.

• In addition to signing up on job search sites, check the websites of organizations with behavioral units for job openings, typically found under "Career Opportunities." Child/adolescent behavioral health units often hire RNs without specific psych experience but with a strong pediatric background.

Networking

• Consider joining a professional organization. The most well-known professional organization for psychiatric nurses, including those specializing in behavioral health, is the American Psychiatric Nurses Association (APNA). It is a leading organization that focuses on advancing the practice of psychiatric nursing, providing education, and promoting mental health advocacy. Their journal may include advertisements for job openings.
• APNA's annual conference this year is in October in New Orleans, and it would be a great way to make contacts, find job openings, or mentorship opportunities, and include on your resume.
• Let your current colleagues or connections in school nursing or urgent care know you're interested in pediatric psych. You might find that some positions or shadowing opportunities come through word-of-mouth.
• Make a profile on LinkedIn and join any relevant groups on the site.

Conclusion

I'm excited for you to make this change. One last thought is to consider becoming a psychiatric nurse practitioner if it seems like a good fit at some point down the road.

Very best wishes,

Nurse Beth