Nursing is an amazing career to choose! It is very diverse, and you can do almost anything with a nursing degree. However, many people are not aware of this and think that bedside nursing is the only thing a registered nurse can do. In this article, I am going to talk about how to select the right nursing specialty (or concentration) based on your personality type.
It is very crucial that you select a field of nursing you love (based on your preferences), because if you don’t, you could experience “burn out” and leave the nursing profession altogether. Unfortunately, I have seen this throughout my nursing career.
If you rather watch a video about me talking about this topic, you can watch it here:
How People View the Nursing Field
A while back, I was talking to a respiratory therapist who told me that she thought about going to nursing school to be a nurse, but decided against it. She said that she saw how hard floor nursing was for nurses, and she decided it wasn’t for her. I tried to explain to her that working as a bedside nurse was not the only field of nursing and that there were many other different nursing specialties. In addition, I explained that bedside nursing was an excellent career to start out in because it taught you how to be a nurse. However, it is a demanding specialty, and depending on your personality, it may not be something you want to do for your entire nursing career.
Personality Types in Nursing
After my conversation with the respiratory therapist, I started to think about how different personality types like different nursing specialties. When I started working as a nurse, I took a job as a bedside nursing on a fast-paced ICU step-down unit. I loved it at first because I was finally able to learn nursing skills, but after 3 years I became very burned out. I didn’t know why I hated my job, and I thought that maybe I made a mistake by becoming a nurse. But then I figured out that the fast-paced atmosphere of bedside nursing did not fit my personality.
Update: we no longer support modern-day personality tests.