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If you’ve reached a stage in your nursing career where you really want to push yourself and make full use of your abilities, or if you have a passion for a particular area of nursing which you think is poorly understood, it might be time for you to consider taking a PhD. It’s an experience that can be life-changing. Many consider it to be the most exciting stage of their professional lives, but it also opens up a lot of fresh opportunities for the future.
It strengthens your skills
Undertaking a PhD is challenging, in part because it’s designed to push you out of your comfort zone, forcing you to look for new ways of doing things and to find solutions to problems that you may never have been confronted with before. You’ll develop a new respect for your own abilities as, with support from your supervisor, you learn new research techniques and develop a richer understanding of existing material published in your field. You’ll also have the chance to deepen your understanding of ethics and improve your applied nursing skills.
It gives you the chance to advance knowledge
Unlike the average PhD course, PhD nursing programs tend to be practical in focus, aiming not just to expand the scope of knowledge in the field but to explore the way that knowledge can be applied to help people or improve the way practice is managed. It enables you to draw on your experience and further substantiate your ideas so that you can advocate for practices you know are effective. It can also be a voyage of discovery, leading to ideas you would never otherwise have considered. You’ll become a thought leader, no longer putting up with approaches you know could be improved but instead doing something about them. You’ll also be able to help the next generation of nursing students.
It opens up wide-ranging career paths
Although many people choose to use a PhD as a springboard for further academic research or lecturing, others are keen to return to active engagement with patients and clinical staff as soon as possible. When you have a PhD, you have much more control over the direction you take with this. You’ll be eligible for senior management positions and could become a director of clinical services, get involved in health advocacy or act as a liaison in clinical trials for a pharmaceutical company. You could coordinate nursing research in your facility or manage workflows across departments to optimize patient care.
The earlier in life that you start a PhD, the greater the benefit you can get – and give – as a result of it. This type of study is designed not simply to give you a qualification that shows people what you can do, but to change the way you approach learning and understanding in the future. It will enrich your life on many levels. Although it’s sometimes seen as the conclusion of the education process, it’s often the place where the real discovery begins.
