Road Map
Career coaches offer techniques to guide progress towards professional goals

By Phil McPeck
March 4, 2003

Good news! Your nursing career is putty in your hands. But can you shape it into more than the privilege of working nights and weekends for too little pay, not enough respect and living with heartstopping stress?

The answer is yes, if you learn and apply the career management techniques of coaches, placement directors and employment counselors, the professionals who make more rewarding careers their career.

Here today, where tomorrow?

Shelly Field launched her New York-based career-coaching firm, the Shelly Field Organization, to fulfill a promise to herself: If she could break into the music industry with degrees in business and sociology when no one would help her, she would help others with their careers, she said.

She's the author of more than a dozen career-oriented books, including Career Opportunities In Health Care: A Comprehensive Guide to Exciting Careers Open to You in Health Care. She speaks about career development at least 100 times a year and has an affinity for nurses and the medical community because it is the field in which her parents made their living.

"What I tell people to do is sit down periodically with paper or a computer and write down what your goals are, what you really wish you could do with your career and your life," Field said. "Your career and your life are so intertwined. I'm a big advocate of writing down what you want, because then you can look at it and see how to get there."

It's a road map, said Sarah Peters, MSN, CNS. As director of recruitment and placement at the University of Texas at Austin and coordinator of its RN-to-BSN program, Peters is an expert in launching and advancing careers. She works with new graduates, midcareer and advanced practice nurses.

"Twenty years ago, I don't think nurses were thinking forward so much," she said. "But at this point, I certainly think they're looking at their lives in terms of 'Where do I want to be in three years? Where do I want to be in five? Where do I want to be in 10?' "

This new forward thinking also is changing the nursing education model, Peters said. More nurses are going directly from a bachelor's degree to graduate school to prepare for their career, forsaking the long-standing cycle of school-to-work-to-school-a bachelor's degree followed practice, then a master's degree and more practice and finally, a doctorate and practice.

Visibility and vision

"Always network because you can never tell when, even if you love your job, the next best job is right around the corner," Field said. "The more you network, the more people you know, the better your career will be and the better your life will be. You want to set yourself apart from other employees in a positive sense. Sometimes you have to go back to school to get some additional training. Make yourself visible to your supervisor for promotions. Make yourself visible so potential employers can see that you're a hot commodity. I stress to people that in any job, they should volunteer or mentor people."

Graduating nurses are increasingly weighing the academic culture of institutions as they look at employers and career paths, Peters said. "They're smart. They're very discerning," which is an important trait for RNs of any experience who want to get the most out of a career. "They're looking at the promotion opportunities, the growth opportunities, the tuition reimbursement. They're looking at 'What chance do I have in terms of leadership management to move up?' They should see a clear picture of upward mobility," Peters said.

"I think they should ask questions about advanced practice roles: clinical nurse specialists, nurse practitioners, nurse midwives, nurse anesthetists. You want to look at ownership of a nursing system. Are nurses accountable, responsible for practice in that setting?"

Beating burnout

When nurses turn to Field, "They want to know what they can do to make their career better and their life better," she said. "Sometimes, you're in a job and you don't really want to leave. Most people really like what they do, they just have gotten so burned out they can't see the challenge.

"You're so overworked you start to feel underpaid for what you're doing. What happens is you get all wound up in your cases and you're trying to balance that with family or with going to school again or any other number of worries or concerns and you tend not to take care of yourself. There are things you can do to make your job better. I really believe everybody working in health care, especially nurses, should practice some kind of stress management and stress reduction. "

Humor rejuvenates, Field said. "In a very fast-paced environment where there are a lot of things happening, people stop thinking about how funny things can be. The way to break a lot of stress, no matter how bad it is, is to train yourself to see the humor in every situation."

But Field's own preference is a stress-busting, no-expense "visualization vacation" that works like this: "Close your eyes and try to put yourself in the position of where you were when something made you smile. Think about that as hard as you can. All the smells and the feelings you had. If you close your eyes and think about that for a couple of minutes, you can sometimes bring yourself back to a bit of calmness."

"Remember," Field said, "You can't help others until you take care of yourself."

Taking care of business

Victoria Rayner knows as much as anyone about taking care of yourself and the importance of self-esteem in managing a career to maximum satisfaction. After a disfiguring burn in 1972, Rayner became a pioneer and specialist in the field of cosmetic medicine, merging aesthetics and dermatology. Her skin care practice serving physicians at the University of California, San Francisco led to an appointment to the dermatology faculty, numerous books and the creation of two institutes: the Center for Appearance and Esteem in San Francisco and the Rayner Institute for Career Advancement in Washington, D.C. It is through the latter that Rayner counsels clients on the intricacies of managing careers.

"What I try to tell women is our careers are our businesses," Rayner said. "Very little is available to nurses to learn how to be businesswomen. Primarily in our culture, women are told they shouldn't earn too much money or be too powerful and I think nowhere do you see that more than with the nurse." Additionally, she said, with job opportunities as never before, "I think it scares a lot of nurses."

"I've written the very first course on earning a living for people that are going to be working with physicians." Clinical aestheticians, be they RNs or cosmetologists moving into a dermatology practice through the Career Advancement Institute, study interviewing at length, Rayner said. "You can't tell me that an RN who studied for four years but does not study how to interview is trying to do something on her behalf. She's intelligent enough to know how important education is to what she does, so why in the world, if there's $20,000 to $40,000 at stake in negotiations for her salary, would she put herself in a position [of not studying]?"

Rayner said the secret to a more rewarding career, both financially and personally, is a thought process, a recognition and respect of self and skills that she doesn't see a lot of in nurses. "They don't have a sense of who they are as people or what theybringing to the job. We need to think in terms of what we're bringing to the employer--always," she said.

"Each nurse, when he or she becomes a nurse, is taking something from the profession. They need to think in terms of what they can give back and in terms of how they represent the nursing community."

Contact Phil McPeck at getpjm@aol.com