Making the Transition from Student Nurse to RN: Elevate Your Career from Day 1

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With winter graduation ceremonies just barely behind you now, next stop for you new grads is sitting for your NCLEX. (You got this!)

Fast forward 2-3 weeks, you’ve barely had time to adjust to the new letters at the end of your name (RN) and it’s about to be time to start your preceptorship at your new job. If you’ve accepted a job in a hospital as a new grad, this blog post is for you.

This blog post will provide new graduate nurses with savvy tips and tricks to make the transition from student to Registered Nurse (RN) a smooth and successful one. It will provide a range of strategies to help navigate the clinical setting, strategies for problem-solving, suggestions for how to improve communication skills and gain credibility with peers, plus ideas on optimizing practice and clinical reasoning.

Mentorships and Professional Networking

A nurse mentor is similar to the role of a nurse preceptor – an experienced nurse who teaches, supports, and advocates for a new nurse as they become familiar with their new role as a registered nurse.

Just to be clear, a preceptor is the person who is utilized when you are hired on to work as a nurse, often in a in patient hospital role. They would be a colleague that you would continue to work side by side with once your training is completed. While a mentor can be someone who is not directly from your group of colleagues. Sometimes a hospital will have a mentorship program, but you don’t have to find a mentor through your workplace. It would actually be more beneficial to find an outside mentor, as they are unbiased and in it for YOU, not strictly for the company you both work for.

The ANA (American Nurses Association) also has an entire mentorship program, which is outside of the workplace and accessible on an individual and personal level.

There are a number of benefits that come with having a mentor as a new grad nurse. A nurse mentor will support you as you get your bearings in your new role as a licensed health care professional. You may hear horror stories of not so great mentors/preceptors, and you know what, many of those stories might be true.

Professional networking is also crucial to your “up bringing” as a new nurse in the field. This is definitely something your mentor can give you guidance with as well. Networking is what will allow doors that you didn’t even know existed, to open for you in your career. Unless you want to strictly work nursing jobs that are more linear than ones that elevate your career and allow for growth in all directions.

By this, I mean taking advantage of networking opportunities outside of the hospital or your place of work. Finding meetings and conferences that are in the realm of expertise that you want to be a part of. If your long term ambition involves emergency medicine, education, or maybe a specialty like forensic nursing, find an event that involves those things and attend it! Doesn’t matter that you aren’t a specialist in that field quite yet. You have your RN license, and that’s the first huge step in that direction. The rest will come.

The best advice I can give to a new grad nurse is to start building your network as early as possible. You can start this while still in nursing school honestly. But if you didn’t, that’s okay. Start now! Here’s a website with a bunch of specialized nursing conferences that are going on this year.

Understanding the Professional and Legal Obligations of Registered Nurses

During your time in nursing school, I have no doubt you heard words like “negligence“, “malpractice“, and “scope of practice” thrown around a lot. Along with the importance of top notch documentation practices. There are a lot of legal obligations that come with having “RN” at the end of your name. All of which need to be taken incredibly seriously.

Not to say you should feel like you are walking on egg shells every single day that you work. But to be aware of what is expected and where the different lines are drawn in your practice are important aspects of the job of a registered nurse.

I will say, after 4 years of working as a registered nurse in a hospital now, a lot of these expectations and awareness of different lines drawn have become second nature. The one thing I’ve learned in practice, that they don’t necessarily teach you in nursing school, is to CYA (cover your ass) because if something were to go sideways after you do something that a doctor ordered, the blame can fall on the nurse more often than not.

Nurses are not only trained on nursing-focused patient care strategies but also on practices that are essentially part of the checks and balances system of the doctors’ practice. I’ve only been a nurse for 4 years, but have talked to enough “old school nurses” to know that doctors have become a lot less hands on with patents than they used to be before all of the new technologies that have become available.

Long story short, with nurses becoming more of the direct eyes, ears, and hands of the doctors its more important now than ever to be aware of the legal limitations and implications of what we do in our practice as nurses.

My best advice to help you stay on the safe side of the legal boundaries is, when in doubt or when you have a slight worry that something could be wrong or a bad move, ask. Put the ball in the doctors court if there’s a concern with your patient beyond what you can control. Or if a medication sounds little questionable don’t hesitate to reach out to the pharmacy in your hospital. They will either clarify things or direct you to talk to the ordering provider about the medication order.

Developing Strategies to Cope with Stress and Burnout

New grad nurses are just as susceptible to burn out as a nurse who’s been working for 5 years, possibly even more susceptible. Seeing as you might just barely be recovered from the stress and burnout of nursing school. So let’s start your career off on the right foot by developing strategies right out the gate, to cope with the stress that comes with the job position.

Sure, you went into this profession because you have a passion for taking care of others, but you need to be prepared to focus on your own health and well being just as much as your patient’s. If not even more. My favorite reference to this has always been teh example of the flight attendants speech just before take off. “In the event that the oxygen masks drop due to low cabin pressure, make sure to secure your own mask before helping anyone else with theirs.”

Point being, you cannot help anyone else if you don’t help yourself first.

Making a Good Impression at Your First Nursing Job

This one should honestly go without saying. I can’t imagine anyone not wanting to make a good impression at their new job, especially a job that you just spend 2+ years going to school for to land. Trying to make a good impression shouldn’t stop after the first day, or even the first 90 days for that matter.

Keep in mind how infrequently you will actually be at work if you are working 12 hour shifts 3 days a week at your new job. Your colleagues and managers won’t be seeing you on a 5 day a week basis like other jobs. It’s going to take some time for them to get a feel for the kind of person/nurse you are, so you will want to focus on making a good impression during each shift.

I’ve worked with quite a few new grads, and was one not too many years ago at this point. I’m going to share a few traits I’ve noticed or picked up on with myself that did not leave the best first impression.

• Being Unteachable
  As a new grad, your primary goal is to learn and be taught how things work on the unit you now work on. Being unteachable can be incredibly off putting. I’m not saying that not understanding something right off is being an unteachable person. I’m talking about those moments where you couldn’t care less to learn and just don’t pay attention, or are showing high levels of over confidence for a position you are just starting in.
  
• Having No Sense of Urgency
  Nurses who have no sense of urgency when there is an urgent situation at hand certainly do not leave the best impression on their managers and colleagues. You need to show that you know when it’s time to take action or can at least follow the cues from others when a situation arises.
  
• Not Showing Up on Time or at all
  This one will peeve off management just as much as it will your colleagues. Especially those of the opposite shift that will be handing off to you. Someone who shows up late all the time can be just as frustrating as someone who calls out often. Both are very unbecoming of a nurse that’s in any stage of their career.
  
• Overconfidence
  This one can get a new grad in a lot of trouble if left unchecked. Having confidence in your self on a healthy and reasonable level is definitely not a bad thing. But when a new grad walks on the unit and acts like they know better than the seasoned nurse who is teaching them, or tries to act more independently than they should be right out the gate, that can be a problem. Not only is it showing signs of being unteachable but is also putting patients in potential danger.

Taking Advantage of Continuing Education Opportunities

This one is important both for your career but also for keeping up with your licensure. Sure your degree that you just earned will get you through to the first time you have to renew your license, but there are a certain number of CEUs (continuing education units) that you will be required to complete each year in order to maintain your licensure in the event of an audit.

I don’t believe that audits happen often (not that I’ve personally seen at least), but best to always be prepared. Any college course you do in the realm of nursing and health science can count toward CEUs, as well as other required courses and modules that you complete in accordance with your workplace needs.

It varies from state the state, but I can say from my own experience, that when renewing my license it asks me questions regarding whether I am actively working as a nurse currently/recently or not. They take into account whether you are up to date on current nursing practices or not, or if you might have been away from nursing for some years and might be rusty or behind the times on s few things. They would expect the individual who has been away from bedside for sometime to present CEU hours to show that they’ve been keeping their knowledge fresh and as up to date as possible in their down time.

Opportunities are available allllll over the place for CEU hours. For instance, some of the conferences and expos that I linked to in the section above where I covered mentorships and networking state that attendance counts for X amount for contact hours (another phrase that means CEU hours.

Nursing journals, physical or online, also contain opportunities for CEUs. Some of these opportunities are paid while sometimes you might come across free opportunities. You will want to make sure to keep record of any hours you’ve completed outside of your workplace.

Conclusion

Becoming a registered nurse requires dedication and hard work, but it is an immensely rewarding and satisfying career. By taking advantage of mentorship and networking opportunities, understanding professional and legal obligations, developing stress-coping strategies, making a good first impression, and utilizing continuing education opportunities, you will be well-equipped for a successful career as a registered nurse.

Now that you know how to make the transition from student to RN, apply these tips and tricks to make your own journey from student to registered nurse a successful one. You got this!