7 Nursing Certifications to Advance Your Career

So, you love your job as a nurse and want to continue helping others for as long as possible – amazing! You’re doing a selfless, vital job, and you’ll be changing people’s lives on a daily basis. But what’s next for your career? Is there anything you can strive towards in the future?

The answer is yes, there absolutely is! In fact, there are several advanced nursing certification options available to you as a registered nurse, giving you plenty of opportunities to enhance your career and keep you learning new skills throughout the years. Here are seven nursing certifications that you might want to consider to further your career and get yourself ready for larger roles.

1.  Graduate Certificate of Nursing

First off, one of the most popular nursing certifications to consider would be the graduate certificate of nursing – which gives you a great refresher of everything you learned during your training and more. You can choose to focus on career advancement in one of three in-demand areas, including leadership and management, advanced practice, and education. Masters-qualified nurses earn an average of $30,000 more a year than registered nurses, so this is an excellent stepping stone to advancing your career tenfold.

2.  Basic Life Support

If you’re a newly graduated nurse, you’ll need to obtain your Basic Life Support (BLS) certification to make sure you’re ready to respond to all kinds of emergencies. You’ll learn CPR techniques and how to use a defibrillator, along with how to respond when your patient can’t breathe. This is one of the most basic nursing certifications you can get, and you don’t need any prior qualifications or licences before getting certified in BLS.

3.  Paediatric Advanced Life Support

Paediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS) isn’t an essential certification for nurses to get, but we think it’s definitely worth considering as you’ll learn how to offer life support to children in distress. Similar to BLS, PALS allows you to use the same methods of intervention but on smaller bodies, letting you help distressed children with breathing and cardiovascular interventions. To qualify for this certification, you’ll need excellent paediatric BLS skills before registering.

4.  Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support

Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support (ACLS) teaches you advanced life-saving techniques that can help you save more patients you encounter, letting you learn how to place breathing tubes, recognise heart attacks, read heart monitors and test results, and prescribe correct medications. You’ll often need BLS training before getting this certification, and it depends on your specific hospital as to whether you need this qualification before working in critical care speciality areas.

5.  Certified Emergency Nurse

With your Certified Emergency Nurse certification, you’ll be able to work in emergency departments (ED), helping critically ill or injured patients as they come in. This exam requires you to sit a 175-question paper, and it covers plenty from cardiopulmonary resuscitation to respiratory and neurological emergencies. You’ll also need to know about the physical, mental, and environmental aspects of ED nursing. Most people only need their valid RN licence to qualify for this training, and it can give you plenty of great technical skills to use throughout the rest of your career.

6.  Critical Care Registered Nurse

If you’re hoping to move onto trauma and cardiac wards with intensive care units, you might need to get certified as a Critical Care Registered Nurse (CCRN) before being accepted into this new role. Trauma and intensive care units are incredibly high-impact care settings, meaning you’ll benefit greatly from this certification to help your clinical judgement, professional bedside manner, and ethical practices. Every hospital board is different, but generally speaking, to qualify for this certification, you’ll need to have a valid RN licence and either complete 1,750 hours caring for critical adult patients or 2,000 clinical hours over the course of five years.

7.  Family Nurse Practitioner

Family Nurse Practitioners (FNP) are known for their high degree of competency in patient care spanning over an entire lifetime. If you want to go into this sector, where you’ll usually work in a primary care setting with a wider range of patients, you’ll need to obtain your FNP certification. To do this, you’ll need your valid RN licence, a Master’s in Nursing (or similar level of higher education), and have logged 500 clinical hours.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, there are plenty of nursing certifications that you can consider to advance your career and continue your higher education! Which certifications you choose will depend on your current role and whether you work with adult patients, children, or within certain specialties. There are some that are more beneficial than others depending on where you see yourself going in the future, so make sure you shop around and find the best certifications for your preferred specialties. Good luck!