2019 Nursing Salary Survey Part 2: Career and Job Satisfaction

Earlier this year, allnurses invited active Licensed Practical Nurses/Licensed Vocational Nurses (LPNs/LVNs), Registered Nurses (RNs), and Advanced Practice Registered Nurses (APRNs) from the United States to respond to questions in the 2019 allnurses online Salary Survey regarding Job and Career Satisfaction. The interactive charts below show the results of responses from almost 9000 nurses.

CAREER SATISFACTION

Are you satisfied with choosing nursing as a career?

It is reassuring and encouraging to see that the results of the survey showed that an overwhelming majority of the nurse participants across the board are glad that they chose the nursing profession. When asked “How satisfied are you with your career decision to be a nurse?”, 42.86% of the respondents said they were Satisfied and 38.07% were Very Satisfied for a total of 79.93% in the satisfied category.

On the other side, only a very small minority of nurses regret having selected nursing as a career. 7.78% selected Dissatisfied while 1.48% selected Very Dissatisfied. Only a mere 9.26% indicated dissatisfaction with their nursing career choice.

Reflecting on the changes you have seen during your nursing career and envisioning what may occur in the future of the nursing profession, How likely are you to recommend a career in nursing to others?

Although the results indicate a high rate of satisfaction with their career decision to become a nurse, would the nurses recommend nursing to others? Before reading further, what would your answer be???

The respondents answered positively with 24.48% saying they Very Likely would and 35.77% responding Likely for a total of 60.25%. A total of 22.5% responded with Unlikely or Very Unlikely, while 17.26& were neutral. This is a pretty strong recommendation for those considering nursing as a future career.

JOB SATISFACTION

One can be satisfied with their career choice, but that doesn’t necessarily carry over to satisfaction with a current job. Let’s see what the results indicate about job satisfaction.

How satisfied are you with your current job?

In spite of complaints, a huge majority of respondents (63.23%) stated they were either Very Satisfied (19.4%) or Satisfied (43.83%). Only 20.04% expressed they were Dissatisfied (16.06%) or Very Dissatisfied (3.98%) with 16.74% remained neutral.

What factors influence your job satisfaction?

We dug further to assess what things influence job satisfaction. Respondents had the opportunity to select how much each of the following influence job satisfaction:

• Advancement Opportunities
• Benefits
• Breaks
• Nurse/Manager Relationship
• Nurse/Physician Relationship
• Overtime
• Pay
• Safe Work Environment
• Staffing Levels

Combining the Extremely and Very Influential results and the Slightly and Not at All results, the overall scores for nurses’ responses show that Safe Work Environments (71.26 %) carry the most influence followed by Staffing Levels (63.87%), Nurse/Manager Relationship (64.22), and Pay (60.96%). Overtime (55.52%) and Breaks (45.83%) scored high on the other end of the spectrum indicating little or no influence on Job Satisfaction.

Conclusion

Of course, these numbers may differ across levels of experience, specialties, etc. Clearly, the pride of nursing runs very deep. Though filled with challenges, nursing is the backbone of quality patient care, and most nurses would never want to do anything else. How about you? We would love to hear from you. Please post your comments below.

Be sure and use the interactive graphs below to see the differences based on specialty, gender, experience and more.

To read more about the survey results, go to:

2019 Salary Survey Results Part 1 - Demographics

Links to additional survey results articles will be posted here upon publication. Please post your comments below.