Distance education gives all nurses an opportunity to advance their careers and educational levels. It provides for flexible scheduling, allows a user controlled pace, and may help fill the rising number of RN vacancies by allowing existing LPNs to advance to RN without impacting families or jobs.

I found an article that speaks to this last. The article out of Clearwater, Florida, talks about how distance education helped an LPN with more than 20 years of experience achieve her degree as an RN and put those years of experience back to work in the health care field rather than having her retire from health care work.

Earlier in the week, I posted about a study on job and career satisfaction among nurses with Associates Degrees versus Bachelors Degrees. Read more on that here.

However, while this study found that most BSN holders had higher job and career satisfaction, I believe that in cases like this, the person with existing medical experience who advances on to a nursing degree (even a two year degree), will have a higher level of satisfaction with their new position than others with a similar degree and no prior experience.

I found an article relating the level of nursing education to the level of job satisfaction and job retention among the nursing profession. The article looks at four nurse educators who recently won an award for writing a journal article back in 2005.

It was published in Sigma Theta Tau’s Journal of Nursing Scholarship under the title “Education as a Determinant of Career Retention and Job Satisfaction Among Registered Nurses.” The study compared RNs from Associates Degree programs to 4 year BSN programs, looking at their overall job satisfaction and their career retention. The conclusion of the article was that students graduating from a BSN program were more likely to be happy in their jobs and to stay in the nursing career field.

Check it out for yourself and let me know what your impressions are. You can comment using the link below or send me an email here at the Nursing Show at comments@nursingshow.com.