Abstract
Background: Career planning in nursing is often haphazard, with many studies showing that nurses need personal motivation, education, and the support of workplaces, which are often dominated by political and fiscal agendas. Nurses often need institutional and personal support to plan their careers and make decisions regarding their career aspirations. Method: A descriptive qualitative design was used. Data were gathered using semi-structured digitally recorded interviews and analysed for common categories. Twenty seven (n = 27) participants were interviewed. Results: There were four categories revealed by the participants who described their career progression experiences: moving up the ladder, changing jobs for career progression, self-driven and the effects of institutional environments. Conclusion: Many of the participants' careers had been shaped serendipitously. Similar to other studies, these nurses felt political, institutional and financial factors impacted on their career opportunities. There are implications for nursing managers with more support required for nurses to plan their career trajectories. In addition to an organisation centred approach to career planning, nurse leaders and managers must take into account the personal and professional requirements of their nurses. Nurses themselves also need to take personal responsibility for career development. Greater support for nurses' career planning and personal drive will help organisations to plan their future workforce needs.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 52 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | BMC Nursing |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Publication status | Published - 19 Oct 2015 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2015 Luck et al.
Open Access - Access Right Statement
© 2015 Luck et al. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.Keywords
- career development
- nurses
- nursing
- qualitative research