It’s never too early or too late to start thinking about ways to improve your professional skill set and give your career a boost. If you’re thinking about changing jobs or trying to level up your current role by leveraging a promotion, you’ll need to consider what steps to take to improve your chances of success. With that in mind, here are six tips that could help give your career a boost.
Know What You Want
Before you can take any specific self-improvement measures, you should sit down and think about what you want to achieve in your career, both in the long term and the short term. Do you want to get a promotion? Are you looking for a new role in a similar field? Would you prefer to head into a completely new line of work?
Ask yourself these questions and figure out what your career goals are. Only from this point can you start to create a plan for how you’ll achieve them.
Get Qualified
Once you know what you want to do, consider whether it would benefit your career to go back to school or get a new qualification. If you’re planning to enter a new field, you may need to go to college to make sure you have the right skills and knowledge base. This doesn’t have to mean going to an in-person college – there are now many online-only universities that can provide you with an excellent education.
If you’re considering a career in healthcare, consider an online MBA in healthcare administration. Alternatively, think about shorter training courses that could allow you to highlight skills on your resume.
Network
An effective long-term solution for building a successful career is to network. Networking involves harnessing the power of your existing relationships to share professional knowledge and opportunities. It’s all about talking to people, building relationships, and increasing your awareness of business trends.
Expanding your network and working hard to maintain good connections with your existing network could help you find out about job opportunities, but it can also help you hone your skills and share in other people’s knowledge.
Not sure how to network? Try using online networking platforms, visiting in-person networking events, or even just maintaining contact with people after you’ve worked with them.
Read Business Books
Reading books that are relevant to your line of work is a great way to learn more about the latest developments in the field. You could also read professional self-help books that could help you develop leadership, communication, or organization skills.
Educate yourself regularly, and you’ll be developing your professional mindset every day.
Manage Your Time
It’s not always easy to balance work commitments with your personal life, so it’s important to find an effective strategy to manage your time. Time management strategies can help you make the most of your time at work and your time at home. This will help you get more out of every day, and maximizing your time could lead to greater career success.
Ask for What You Want
If you want a promotion, you need to let your boss know that you’re a good choice for the position, both with your actions and your words. If your manager doesn’t know you want to take on more responsibility, they may overlook you.
It can be tricky to talk to a manager about professional development, but having an open conversation could help them see that you’re a driven and dedicated member of staff.
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Student nurses are those that are partaking in an educational course. Unlike qualified nurses, they are on clinical rotations and their work is supervised by a nursing instructor. It can take a few years to be qualified and during that time, student nurses will likely work on different sites to test and enhance their skills and knowledge. To achieve the most from your education and time as a student nurse, here are some essentials you need.
On-site clothing
The role of a student nurse requires on-site work as well as educational sessions. Therefore, you must have the right clothing to ensure your and your patient’s health and safety. A few items you’ll need are scrubs, shoes, and PPE. Shopping for clothes and equipment is simple online. You can find scrub jackets at UniformAdvantage.com as well as other equipment.
After you qualify, you will require clothes anyway. Thus, getting them ahead of time will benefit you and help you transition into the role of a student nurse smoothly.
Compression stockings
As a nurse, student or not, you will be on your feet for most of the day. When you are standing for too long, you are vulnerable to varicose veins in your older age.
To prevent this, compression stockings will increase and maintain your blood flow, which will also prevent pain and swelling of the feet and ankles.
Stethoscopes
Stethoscopes are an essential tool that every student nurse needs. They are to be worn at all times so that you can check a patient’s heartbeat while on the job. You never know when a patient might require one. Or, you might be randomly chosen to perform a health check to test your skills.
If you are always well prepared, then you will be never caught out and looked down on by the staff. When you have the right tools, it shows you are ready and organized for any nursing situation.
Blood pressure cuffs
As a student nurse, you may often be asked to check a patient’s blood pressure. Most hospital environments have them attached to the monitors. However, it is ideal to have your own.
Moreover, as a student nurse, it is common for you to move around to different nursing situations, such as people’s homes. Thus, having a blood pressure cuff on you will be necessary to take the reading as the person you are caring for will likely not have one.
Penlights
Penlights are essential for checking a patient’s neuro status. When you shine a penlight into a patient’s eye, you can their neuro response through eye movements.
Penlights are cheap and very easy to carry around in your scrub jacket pocket. Always have one on hand because you never know what situation you might step into.
Dressing scissors
A common task for student nurses to achieve is to dress wounds. These are great tests to assess a student’s skills, so they will likely be asked by the nursing tutor or doctor on the ward with you.
So that you are always prepared and ready, having dressing scissors will ensure that you can efficiently dress the wound and cut the dressing.
You may also require scissors for various other miscellaneous uses, so they are always handy to have.
Watch
You will often be in a nursing environment for a long time. Nurses can work around 12 hours at a time, so you will want to check up on the time.
Student nurses are often given a schedule so that they can move around a hospital to work on different wards. If so, you will need to keep an eye on the time so that you aren’t late.
Sometimes you will be required to have your hands and wrists free of jewelry for the safety of patients. Thus, a pocket watch is a handy tool to keep an eye on the time.
Study guides
Whether you are on the wards or not, a study guide will be a good item to carry around to fill your spare time with. Or, if you become unstuck in a situation and lack the skills, you can rely on your guide to give you the help you need without pestering other staff. However, never be afraid to ask questions as that is how you learn.
A study guide is an essential piece of equipment as a student nurse as it is something to refer back to as well as enhance your knowledge on the move.
Tote bags
A tote bag can come in really handy when you are a student nurse. You will be able to carry around all of your essentials and be able to grab them easily.
A soft tote bag will be safe for patients and blend in well with your uniform.
In your tote bag, you can carry your study guide, stethoscope, scissors, and any other essential pieces of equipment you need.
Drug guide
All student nurses will be learning about the different drugs and medications and what they do. You might not know every single one. Thus, having a drug guide will help you assess what a patient needs and get it right.
You can find pocket drug guides, which will be easy to carry around in your tote bag or your scrubs pocket.
Badge holder
Student nurses will require a badge just like a qualified nurse. It signifies that you are eligible to help patients and work on the ward.
You must carry your badge on you at all times for the sake of the practice and its patients. To keep your badge safe, a badge holder is handy.
Note pads and pens
As a student nurse, you will be constantly learning when you are on the wards. You may often be asked to sit and watch a procedure or doctor care for a patient. When you are observing, it is a great time to take notes.
Note-taking will enhance your learning and help you remember some tips and tricks of the industry. Having a notepad and pen at hand all of the time will ensure that you can write down and remember everything that you learn.
A diary
Speaking of stationery, having a diary will be key so that you can organize your time. You will likely move from place to place and be in and out of education throughout your qualification. Thus, writing down your schedule will ensure that you are on time and never miss a session.
If you were to miss a session, it could delay your progress and stop you from learning every trick that you need.
Hand cream
When you are a nurse, you will constantly be washing your hands to free them from bacteria. This is for the health and safety of yourself and your patients. Thus, your hands might become dry and feel irritated while working.
To prevent this, carry around a travel-size hand cream so that you can keep your hands moisturized all of the time.
Anti-bacterial gel and wipes
To keep areas clean and bacteria-free, using anti-bacterial gels and wipes will help. Although most practices will have these lying around, it can be useful to bring your own so that you know where they are located.
A benefit of having anti-bacterial is for the sake of your patients too. Wiping down equipment in front of them will help them to feel at ease.
Flesh toned underwear
Many practices require white scrubs, which can sometimes be see-through. You won’t want anyone seeing your underwear. Thus, wearing flesh-toned underwear will make your underwear invisible.
Having dedicated underwear for work can act as a part of the uniform.
Voice recorder
Although you can write down notes, you might not have time to if you are doing a task. Therefore, having a voice recorder will help you record and listen back to the information that you heard.
A voice recorder will also be a great way for you to hear back a conversation and learn from how you dealt with it.
Clipboard
When you are working in a hospital environment, you will likely need to take notes to hand back to the staff. To do so, a clipboard can make the process easier.
Instead of having to find somewhere to lean on, you can use your clipboard and attach it to your uniform or place it back in your tote bag for easy access.
Podcasts
Although you will learning from your place of education and on the wards, you can attain extra knowledge from the outside.
Nursing podcasts are a great way to learn about real-life scenarios and educate yourself further. Hosts are typically nurses or those that work in the industry, which will give you an insight into how other practices work.
Meal and drink prep
When you are working as a student nurse, you might go to and from your education campus to the practice. Or, you might work incredibly long shifts. Either way, you will need to stay energized and hydrated. Thus, meal and drink prepping will ensure that you can eat and drink on the go.
Meal containers are useful for taking meals. Then, a flask is great for any drink of choice. You might require some tea or coffee to keep you alert during long shifts.
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When it comes to your business, you’re always going to want for it to go in the right direction. That often means setting goals and guiding your business down a set path. And that’s great when you know exactly what you want and need to do. But what happens when you’re not overly sure? Or you feel like you don’t know what to do to get your business to progress? This can happen. It’s natural to feel like you’re hitting a plateau and you don’t know what to do next. Sometimes, we can have goals for our business that get it to a certain stage and we feel like we don’t really know what to do when we get there. That’s normal. However, you are going to want to make sure that you come up with a kind of plan to get your business to the next stage.
Because that’s all this is. You will want to work out what you need to do next to get to where you want to be. And that involves feeling out ideas, seeing what you think might work well for your company, and then testing them. But when you’re not sure what’s going to work, it’s hard to know where to start. So let’s run through some options for you.
Create An Action Plan
To start with, you’re going to want to come up with some kind of action plan. You will find that when you have already achieved the goals you set, you can feel a little lost. So where do you go from here? Think about all of the things you want to achieve and see if you can break them down to work out what you will do with them.
Hire A Strategist
Next up, you might want to think about hiring a strategist or business development person too. Sometimes, it can be hard for you to focus on growing the business if this is something that you don’t excel in – especially if you’re great at other areas of the business. So hiring someone could be perfect for you.
Promote Your Business More
Another option is for you to make sure that you’re marketing your business as much as possible – but in the right ways. So think about the different marketing ideas that are open to you, but choose the ones that are going to be the most suitable to you and your business style.
Improve Your Knowledge
It could be that you want to be able to know more so that you can move forward and grow your business. Do you feel as if your education just isn’t where it needs to be and you’d like to have a better knowledge base to make decisions? Looking into a management course or online analytics degree could help you here. Picking up the skills you need to grow the business could be all it takes to propel things forward.
Hire Some Staff
From here, it could also be as simple as hiring some help. When you want to grow, you may find that you need to take a look at how you’re operating and admit that you need some help. Getting in staff is scary but it could be the right step that will help you to grow your business.
Create A New Product
It could be as simple as adding another product or service – especially if you currently only have one. You may find that you want to be able to grow and this is exactly how it will happen. So think about breaking down your goals and working out what product or service will fit in next.
Set Future Goals
Finally, you may find that it’s going to help you to get to where you want to be if you can focus on setting more goals for you to reach. It could be something big and crazy that you feel like is so out of reach – but then also you know that you need to break down to meet. Having something else to work on can help to keep you focused – which you know you might need. So think about where you’re going next and work backwards to figure out what you need to do.
It can seem overwhelming when you don’t know what you want to achieve or how you’re going to get there, but you can make it happen. Just slow down, break it all down, don’t overthink it and just take action. It’ll make a difference.
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If you’re wondering which path to choose for your studies, or considering a career change, perhaps nursing could be right for you. There are several benefits to being a nurse. You’ll get the chance to help people every single day making it a very rewarding role, and you’ll develop many useful skills. A career in nursing can also offer varied opportunities and you can specialize in a range of different areas. Here are the top three reasons why you should consider a career in nursing.
To really make a difference
Nurses have a positive impact on people’s lives on a personal level every day. They help to improve the health and welfare of others and provide ongoing support. Nurses can also get involved in international projects and non-profits, helping to make the world a better place.
To have a diverse career
No day will be the same if you choose a career in nursing. It’s a very varied job and you will meet people from all walks of life. You also have the option to specialize in different areas such as pediatrics, mental health, geriatrics, and many more. For example, if you become a travel nurse you will be required to take temporary nursing positions in high-need areas. The constant movement from one hospital to another, and giving care to patients across the country is a dream position for many nurses. The advantages of being a travel nurse are getting rewards, more competitive pay, healthcare, dental insurance, etc.
To always be in demand
There will always be demand for nurses, so you can be guaranteed to find work in the future. As medical science and technology evolve, newer and different roles may also become available. Nursing can lead you to fantastic opportunities. This infographic shows a few facts and figures about how the future is looking promising for nurse practitioners.
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There’s a reason why so many people go into the real estate business— it’s an incredibly promising and fulfilling career that, if executed correctly, can bring a lot of wonderful opportunities. In addition to fantastic income potential, it also provides great flexibility and an exciting schedule.
Yet, despite how many wonderful opportunities may be possible through a career in real estate, not everyone manages to make it work for them. The truth is that there are many mistakes that can be made throughout the process if you don’t know what to avoid. Take a look at some of the most common reasons why some people can’t get their real estate careers off of the ground.
They Fail To Market Themselves Adequately
One of the most important aspects of success in real estate is remembering that it’s a business. People aren’t going to come to you out of the kindness of their heart to buy a house. So, it’s important that you put in a considerable amount of effort to find clients. Marketing your real estate business consistently is the only way to ensure that you continue to bring in sales.
Some people aren’t willing to put in the work of the marketing it requires to make money. If you hope to succeed in real estate, you have to see it as a business that must be treated like one.
They Don’t Have Savings
On average, it takes close to a year to make your first sale when you become a real estate agent. This is for a variety of reasons, and most people are prepared for this, so they rely on savings to carry them through until they start building more experience. It’s important that before you quit your full-time job and dive into the real estate world that you have plenty of savings to support yourself. Otherwise, you could risk not having any income for quite a while.
They Don’t Set Goals
The success of any business relies on clear goals and strategies. Real estate agents who fail to strategize through goal setting will find themselves struggling to keep their businesses afloat. It’s important that you have a solid goal-setting process in place and measure your progress on each. Without goals, you’ll be wandering aimlessly through the real estate world. A clear plan of action is the best way to become a top real estate agent.
They Have No People Skills
As a real estate agent, it’s your job to be charming. You’re a salesperson at the end of the day, so you have to be a people person. Many real estate agents who can’t get the hang of the business are the ones that unfortunately don’t have great people skills. If you hope to successfully sell and buy houses, then you’ll need to put on your salesperson hat, and start charming clients!
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