How do you decide what professional training would best meet your development needs? Do you follow recommendations from colleagues, requests from your manager, your own intuition…? Training and development are powerful career advancers, because they build new skills, open up new career directions, and make you a better nursing professional. But choosing how best to spend your training time is not always an easy decision – you have to balance skill needs, career ambitions, and even management and professional expectations.

The formal performance feedback you get on-the-job, is a great source of information to help guide your training decisions. That feedback can become a roadmap for your personalized training and development plan.

For nurses, formal performance feedback comes in many different forms:

• Annual Performance Appraisals – this usually addresses generic skills such as communication, organization, working with others, etc.

• Peer Reviews – whether you have a formal or informal peer review process, performance feedback from peers can be powerful because it comes from those who work closest with you, sometimes even treating the same patients. Ideally the work environment at your facility promotes constructive peer feedback and does not penalize the person being evaluated.

• Competency Assessments – usually a formal process where selected professional skills are evaluated. In the U.S., facilities must do these assessments to maintain regulatory (such as Joint Commission) accreditation. Done well, competency assessments can identify technical skill strengths and weaknesses and provide you with performance feedback.

Individually each form of feedback gives you “a nugget” of information about your performance. But to make effective decisions about training requirements you need a broader view; so all this feedback needs to be consolidated. For example, your supervisor might have given you several compliments about how well you communicate procedure information to patients. On its own this feedback might lead you to believe you are a good communicator. However, peer review feedback might indicate others’ frustration with end-of-shift patient data transfer – your peers may feel you are not communicating well and this might be holding you back from a desired promotion. Viewing all the feedback as an aggregate helps you better determine your specific training needs.

It is only by considering all of your feedback together that get you a balanced view of your performance, which is powerful information for making smart, targeted training decisions. For instance the feedback might reveal an unknown strength that, with some training, would help you advance or transfer to a different specialty. Alternatively, performance feedback might reveal some unknown weaknesses that if improved would create new opportunities.

Once you understand your strengths and weaknesses, selecting training courses is easy because you have the performance feedback to make fact based decisions and get the highest value from your training. Many facilities have a learning management system that helps you identify specific training activities available. The ideal system is integrated with your performance management system/process, so you can search for learning activities based on competencies, skills, interests and performance.

Halogen Software is the industry leading provider for online nursing competency assessments, development plans and performance management. To learn more about our performance management solutions for nurses, visit our website: http://www.halogensoftware.com

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The beauty of nursing is that it offers so many different opportunities. Don’t be afraid to try some of them. Here are a few tips to help you get started.

First of all do your homework. Not all travel nursing agencies are created equal and not all facilities that hire travel nurses are among the best employers. Word travels fast, and information is available; you just have to do a little research.

This site offers a large Forum for discussion about all things nursing, and among them, travel nursing experiences. Spend some time reading through the threads and posts. Ask questions and get the information you need.

There are a multitude of books, websites and blogs by travel nurses with much valuable information. Read everything you can to understand the pros and cons of your next adventure.

Talk to travel nurses who work in your current facility. Some of the questions you may want to ask include:

• Which travel agency they currently work for?
• Do they have other agencies they would recommend and why?
• Have they had bad experiences with any agency and which ones?
• What do they like about their current assignment?
• What don’t they like?
• Do they have a favorite place to travel and why?
• Where don’t they like to go and why?

Some of their answers may be more personal especially if they have chosen locations close to family or friends, but their experiences can provide good insight into what to expect in a travel assignment. Even if the assignment was for their own convenience, the job satisfaction factor comes into play somewhere.

Current travel nurses can help to provide valuable information about what to include in your contract, what kind of information you need to know about a location, a facility and specifics about the nursing assignment.

Each and every one of the travel nurses you network with will probably be able to give you at least one new tip or trick to make life on the road more enjoyable and successful. Take notes and keep a file of these handy tips and tricks. As you become a veteran travel nurse, be sure to share your own tips with others.

You may want to start with a short assignment close to home or near to family and friends so that you have your own support system at hand. Any new situation can and will be stressful and having support systems in place will help to reduce some of that stress.

You may also want to consider taking a leave of absence from your permanent employer while you take a short travel assignment. This ensures you have a job, seniority and benefits to fall back on if this isn’t something you want to do.

Remember to give yourself ample time to evaluate any new venture. No job is perfect, and it may take some time to get used to being a travel nurse as compared to a permanent employee.

By Kathy Quan RN BSN. Kathy is the author of The Everything New Nurse Book, and the owner/author of TheNursingSite.com

©2008 by UltimateNurse.com. All Rights Reserved.

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