How to Become a Nurse Manager

If you are well along in your medical career, and you have worked for a few years as a Registered Nurse or a Licensed Practical Nurse or LPN (LVN/Licensed Vocational Nurse in some states), you may wonder about the opportunities for career advancement. It is always possible for an LPN to do a training program and become an RN, but for RNs, they may not see many opportunities to advance other than getting some training in a specialty area such as pediatric oncology or another higher-paying specialty. One option that is open to the best and brightest candidates, though, is to become a Nurse Manager.

The qualifications to be a Nurse Manager are not specific. Each hospital or nursing home will have their own requirements that may be vastly different to the requirements of another facility. In general, though, the nurse manager will need to have several years of general nursing experience under their belt. It would be helpful if they also had some more specialized experience such as Intensive Care nursing. The number of years of experience is flexible, but as a general rule you would want to have at least four solid years of nursing experience under your belt before you would be considered a viable candidate for a nurse manager position. Other helpful things would be if you had a Masters degree or at least a Bachelors in nursing. This is considered the minimum, so if you need to do an RN to Bachelor of nursing program, that can only be helpful in reaching your goals. Such programs can often be done at least partially online, and in your spare time, so it’s no problem to hold down a full time job and complete the training as you can fit it in. If that is your goal, you will want to find a program that allows you to do the training at your own pace.