15 Jan Charting Your Path: How to Develop a Career Plan in Nursing

Career planning refers to creating a ‘roadmap’ for your professional life, with personal and work-related goals and steps for achieving them. The goal is to map out your professional journey so you can navigate its stages and challenges and achieve long-term success and satisfaction.

This article will explain how to help chart a career plan as a nurse and highlight some of the main benefits of career planning for nurses. 

What is a career plan?

A career plan is a structured and strategic roadmap that focuses on our professional goals, the steps we need to take to attain them, and the approximate timeframes within which we must achieve certain milestones. Creating plans of this kind can help ambitious nursing professionals map out their career trajectories, goals, and aspirations, and also supports and assists them in understanding exactly what they’ll need to do to succeed in their profession. Career plans can also provide nurses with structure and meaning in the daily pursuit of their professional goals, as well as ensuring they don’t lose sight of their end objectives. 

Admittedly, it can be easy to lose momentum and motivation when we are constantly working towards and seemingly endlessly chasing long-term goals — especially if we are not seeing results or rewards for our hard work and efforts right away. But ultimately, career plans help keep us on our paths toward success, keeping us on track even when certain elements of our plan go awry. 

The benefits of career planning

Some of the benefits of creating a career plan as a nurse include:

Establishing Structure

Setting up a roadmap for your professional path enables us to create structure, and also, plan and outline the exact steps you need to take on your road to success. 

Measuring Your Progress 

A career plan also helps to monitor and measure your progress along the way, rather than toiling mindlessly toward a vague idea of what you want to accomplish.

Staying on Track

A career plan can help keep your end goal within your sights, and front of mind at all times.

Steps to create an effective career plan 

Here are some important steps to take when creating an effective career plan as a nurse:

Self-assessment

The first step of creating a career plan is doing a self-assessment or examination that allows you to develop a curated list of careers that match your skills and interests. 

This step is a great way to identify your strengths. For example, someone tossing up whether to complete an FNP-C vs FNP-BC will be better placed to decide on what program to study once they know what they’re good at and what areas of nursing they enjoy.

Researching

Arming ourselves with adequate research on our goals and what it will take to achieve them is imperative, and helps set us up for success. 

For nurses in particular, there is no point blindly aiming for a successful career in the medical field without thoroughly researching what it will take to get there. 

Setting SMART goals

What are SMART goals? SMART is an acronym that stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.

Specific

When setting goals, we need to specify exactly what it is we want to achieve.

Measurable

For a goal to be measurable, we need to have tangible ways to monitor it. The goal-setter must be able to identify when they’ve achieved their goal and also accurately track their progress towards achieving it. 

Achievable

Often, when we have lofty aspirations, we can fall into the trap of aiming too high. This in itself can be discouraging, as when we do not reach our goal, it can be easy to give up entirely. We can avoid this disappointment by instead setting realistic goals that we are able to achieve. 

Relevant

Our goals also need to be relevant to our end objectives. What is it that you are working towards? Setting relevant milestones that support and contribute to your mission is essential. 

Time-bound

Timeliness is paramount when setting goals. 

Setting time frames within which to achieve certain components of your career plan will help you stay on track, and also, ensure that you continue to make steady progress along the way. 

Nursing can seem like a relatively straightforward career path in terms of options, but there are actually plenty of ways you could become a nurse, and work as a nurse. Devising a career plan is the perfect way to figure out exactly what you want, and how you’re going to work towards it. 

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Last Updated on January 15, 2025 by Marie Benz MD FAAD