If healthcare is your name and helping patients is your game, then you might consider a career as a staff nurse. Typically, you'll work in a healthcare facility of some sort, whether that be a hospital or a nursing home.
As a staff nurse, you'll be working closely with doctors and other nurses to ensure patients receive the utmost care and treatment for their health conditions. Usually, this line of work seals the deal with crazy hours. But staff nurses tend to be a little different.
It can vary, but you usually won't work over 40 hours a week. In fact, some weeks you may only work 35 hours. This great schedule does come with a price tag - student debt, to be exact. In order to become a staff nurse, you'll need to earn a bachelor's degree. I mean, you have to know what you're doing in this job so that much makes sense.
There is more than meets the eye when it comes to being a staff nurse. For example, did you know that they make an average of $32.08 an hour? That's $66,734 a year!
Between 2018 and 2028, the career is expected to grow 12% and produce 371,500 job opportunities across the U.S.
There are certain skills that many staff nurses have in order to accomplish their responsibilities. By taking a look through resumes, we were able to narrow down the most common skills for a person in this position. We discovered that a lot of resumes listed communication skills, compassion and detail oriented.
If you're interested in becoming a staff nurse, one of the first things to consider is how much education you need. We've determined that 44.0% of staff nurses have a bachelor's degree. In terms of higher education levels, we found that 5.4% of staff nurses have master's degrees. Even though some staff nurses have a college degree, it's possible to become one with only a high school degree or GED.
Choosing the right major is always an important step when researching how to become a staff nurse. When we researched the most common majors for a staff nurse, we found that they most commonly earn bachelor's degree degrees or associate degree degrees. Other degrees that we often see on staff nurse resumes include diploma degrees or master's degree degrees.
You may find that experience in other jobs will help you become a staff nurse. In fact, many staff nurse jobs require experience in a role such as registered nurse. Meanwhile, many staff nurses also have previous career experience in roles such as licensed practical nurse or nurse.