Can You Return to Nursing After a Hiatus?

Many nurses come to me for advice and career coaching when they ' re ready to return to the nursing workforce after a hiatus. For some, it ' s just been a year or two, and for others, it might have been 15 years of staying home to do the noble work of raising children. The question is, how do you break back in to nursing after being gone so long? It ' s possible, and there ' s a lot to do to get there.Acknowledge the LiabilityThe first thing you need to do when returning to the workforce after a hiatus is to acknowledge to yourself that your absence is a liability. A nurse who hasn ' t worked in two, four, ten, or fourteen years certainly has a lot to catch up on, and I won ' t sugarcoat that it takes effort to get a foot in the door.If you can come to terms with the fact that it will take a lot of due diligence, sweat equity, and skin in the game to get back on your nursing feet, then you ' re on your way. If you fool yourself that it ' s going to be easy, then you may have another thing coming.This is definitely tough love, but it ' s tough love with a purpose: to steel you for the challenging road ahead in pursuit of your (wholly attainable) goal of working as a nurse once again.Make a PlanTrying to reenter the nursing workforce without a plan is like trying to get to a distant destination without a map or GPS. If your plan involves nothing more than searching Monster and Indeed for jobs and blindly applying to anything that catches your eye, that ' s really not a plan.You...
Source: Digital Doorway - Category: Nursing Tags: career career development career management careers healthcare careers nurse nurse careers nurses nursing nursing careers Source Type: blogs