3 Career Options for Nurses You Might Have Overlooked
When people consider job opportunities for nurses, they usually think about the same handful of possibilities: hospital nursing, assisting a private physician, or perhaps teaching at a nursing school. But here are five options that are often overlooked.
Clinical Research Associate (or CRA): This career path could find you working for contract research organizations (CROs) or pharmaceutical companies. While not popular in other parts of the world, in the West, particularly the U.S. and Europe, careers in this field abound. That’s because here, clinical research thrives and is widespread and drug companies also abound.
A CRA usually is required to do some travel, since the position involves coordinating, facilitating and monitoring a clinical trial’s progress as it’s conducted within a particular medical facility. Although this job can be quite exhausting, the pay is good, and it usually comes with appealing benefits such as a car plan and good insurance benefits. Bottom line: If you like to travel, you love your career in medicine but would like to try something other than standard hospital nursing, consider a career as a Clinical Research Associate.
Medical Coder: We’re not talking here about the coding or billing clerk who codes medical records for insurance or billing purposes. Rather, this position involves the person in coding of adverse events that have been observed, and prior / noncomitant medications used during a clinical trial.
To get into the field of coding specialist, a background in the area is helpful, but not always necessary, especially if you already have experience as a nurse. However, having a training certificate would obviously improve your chances.
As with the CRA, this position abounds in the U.S. more than in other countries because of the abundance of clinical trials here. And speaking of CRAs, an experienced one often qualifies for this managerial position. However, even if you’ve never worked in the field of clinical research, if you have supervisory experience, you might stand a good chance of being considered.
Although traditionally this position has not been occupied by nurses, more and more of them have found their way onto this career path in the past decade.
Medical Representative: Usually you’ll see this abbreviated to med rep. But however you spell it, this career path involves a lot of marketing and selling of medical supplies and products. Therefore, to qualify for the position, you must have an entrepreneurial spirit, an outgoing personality, and a strong desire to succeed and to stay on top, because competition is stiff in the field. You might think that this is more a career path for sales people, but drug companies prefer hiring nurses since they’re more familiar with the basics of the health field. But certainly, if you’re trained as a nurse and have some sales history, this could be a perfect career for you.
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These are all great points. Nurses must keep in mind that there are other options in the nursing field aside from the traditional medical surgical area.
Great points!