The Digital Shift in Nursing: Why More Professionals Are Choosing Online NP Routes
Nursing is an incredibly personal career path. You interact face-to-face with patients. You see them at their most vulnerable and exposed.
Your job is to serve as a resource and asset during the darkest and most frightening experiences of their lives. How can you prepare for something so up-close and personal from a distance?
In other words, why are online NP programs gaining so much traction? In this article, we take a look at what’s great about them, what’s less great, and how you can decide if it’s right for you.
First, Why Online NP Degrees are Awesome
Most people who are trying to become nurse practitioners are already working as nurses. This means long shifts, irregular schedules, and quite possibly an entire slate of personal responsibilities to balance alongside your work ones, partners, or families, or even just social obligations that you’re not willing to give up.
In this context, it’s really, really hard to fit in a rigid brick-and-mortar learning curriculum that would typically be required by a traditional nursing master’s degree course. Here’s the good news. Online programs answer almost all of these concerns based on their format alone.
For one thing, you get to skip out on the commute, which, based on national averages, can save you 10 or more hours a week. Think about that.
Do you currently have 10 hours that you could give up on your weekly schedule? If not, how do you figure you’re going to drive to a school every day?
Online nursing programs are also often presented in flexible formats that further enhance your ability to optimize your own schedule. Many will consist of pre-recorded lectures that allow you to engage with coursework at hour own pace.
You will, of course, have general timelines, but in many cases, they’re fairly flexible. Again, this is perfect for someone who knows they might be working 36 to 48 hours of any given week, but they have no idea when. Days? Nights? Weekends? Holidays? With that level of uncertainty, it’s really hard to select a course load.
Finally, online education gives you unlimited options to choose from. Well, nearly unlimited. You do need to make sure that the program is regionally accredited. That means that your state will recognize the qualification from where you get your degree from. You can find a program for certain by checking with the university itself and your state regulatory body.
Why is this a big deal? Well, if you stick with choices in your area, you may not actually have any real options to pick from. There’s a university in your city. That’s where you go. In the world of online learning, you can pick based on your preferences. Your schedule. Your budget. Budget, by the way, is also going to be friendlier in most cases.
Natively online universities can cost almost half the price of traditional learning environments, giving nurses yet another reason to consider, to strongly consider this as an option when looking to get their master’s degree.
What’s Not as Good About Online Degrees?
It’s only fair to take a balanced look at the question, right?
Online degrees, though never inherently bad, do have several barriers that may become relevant depending on your situation. The first that we alluded to in the last heading is the issue of accreditation. Some states are pretty permissive about their accreditation specifications. There, most schools that are nationally accredited will be accepted regionally. Others are more selective.
In these states, if you get a degree from an institution that is not regionally accredited, you won’t be locally licensed, at least not without jumping through quite a few extra hurdles. That’s something you can only find out through research.
The other factor is simply that the online format is not ideal for everyone. If you are a good student who simply can’t self-motivate, you’re not going to do well with online learning. Flexibility is outstanding, but there comes a point where it can transition into procrastination behaviors for certain people.
If you fall into that category, you’ll probably benefit from the more structured requirements of a traditional classroom setting.
Finally, you might simply prefer the extra levels of collaboration that are only possible in person. Every online school in existence will tell you that they foster community among students. Is it true? Well, it’s certainly true that they’re probably doing their best, but let’s be realistic.
There’s a difference between messaging someone once or twice a week with a question and seeing them face-to-face every day. If you’re the sort of person who likes to take advantage of office hours or study with friends at a favorite cafe, you’re probably going to do best in a physical learning environment.
That said, you might also decide that, despite your preferences, you are better off taking advantage of the various other pros that you can only get with remote learning. Again, this is a personal choice.
Why Become a Nurse Practitioner at All?
No matter what, you’re in for a few years in school and thousands of dollars directed towards your education. Is being a nurse practitioner worth it?
Well, there are two ways to look at that question. First, let’s evaluate the matter in financial terms. Nurse practitioners can make almost twice as much as RNs within a year or two of starting. Let’s say that you spend $100,000 getting your master’s degree—an admittedly extravagant sum that most people won’t ever approach with a 10-foot pole. But it’s better to be conservative, isn’t it?
So, in that situation, you would need to work as a nurse practitioner for only two or three years to fully recuperate your investment. From that point on, you’d be profiting from your new degree by a factor of $50,000, $60,000, or even $70,000 a year.
Now, if we want to get really nitty-gritty, this does put a premium on getting your nurse practitioner degree as quickly as possible. After all, the more time you have with your new qualification, the longer you’ll enjoy the salary increase.
That’s a nice thought, maybe, but not one that’s actionable. It’s better—and certainly more sustainable—to choose a path that’s easy for you to commit to. If that means taking five years to get your degree, so be it.
Then there’s the other question: is it worthwhile on a personal level? The answer to that, at least for most people, is certainly yes. Nurse practitioners have a higher level of responsibility. They get to focus on more specific aspects of patient care—things that matter the most to them.
They also typically enjoy more consistent and regular hours instead of those crazy ER 12-hour night shifts. Nurse practitioners are usually in the office by nine and home by five. That will depend, certainly, at least in part on your placement, but it’s something that NPs all over the country experience.
Bottom line? Working as a nurse practitioner is incredibly rewarding. It’s not a question of if you should go for it, but how.