Category: Education

Education

How to Invigorate Your Nursing Career

Erin Sluka
How to Invigorate Your Nursing Career

As a nurse, you have dedicated your life to helping and supporting others. This direct impact on the lives of others can be fulfilling and meaningful in a truly life-changing way; however, after years on the floor addressing the critical care and support of your patients, you may be looking to invigorate your nursing career by taking on new challenges. While directly overseeing the care of your patients can be incredibly rewarding, if you are looking for a change, here are a few ways that you can invigorate your career.

Advanced Degrees and Education

If you find that your brain could use a jumpstart, you may need an outlet for mental stimulation. Consider going back to school for additional education where you can stimulate your mind and love for learning. You can explore an advanced degree option that best suits you to take you to the next step of your nursing career. Whether you want to go back to school to refresh your brain or you want to use your degree to take your next step, education can be a great option.

Getting a higher level of education means that you expand your knowledge, learn additional techniques which help you to provide a higher quality of patient care. It can not only help you to make better healthcare decisions and optimize operational efficiency, but also advance your career at any level. You may want to explore a range of nursing job career options and find out the requirements that the position can offer.

Teaching and Learning

If you value education but don’t see yourself going back to school, you have other ways to infuse knowledge and education into your life. Instead of being the recipient of the knowledge, if you prefer to share what you have learned, educating others may be the right step for you. Exploring a professorship role and career profile can help you understand the responsibilities of the role, salary and expectations.

Leadership and Supervising

If you have a lot of guidance, expertise and experience to offer, you may be well suited to manage others. Providing overarching vision, supporting staff and offering your leadership to a team can be an exciting next step. If you are interested in exploring a supervisory role in nursing, talk with your manager and the leadership team to see what would be necessary to explore that path of your nursing career.

Mentorship and Coaching

Mentorship in nursing is a critical component of success in this sector of healthcare. While many skills are learned and experiences had during nursing school, nothing truly prepares you for the daily grind. Having a support system that can offer mentorship, coaching and sponsorship can prove critical and necessary for new staff. This may be a good outlet for you to embrace new challenges and energize your professional life without a formal step.

Future Paths and Possibilities for your Nursing Career

If you are a nurse who has significantly more experience, you may want to explore your executive career options. Whether you are ready to take on significantly more of a leadership role within your organization or you want to be a part of the strategic vision, you can take on more of a leadership role after pursuing executive career options. If you are someone who is a natural-born leader, this may be the perfect fit for you. You may also consider learning kore about traveling Nurse careers.

Nursing can be one of the most rewarding and enriching professions; however, that does not mean that you will want to stay in the same role forever. If you are someone who is searching for your next chapter, consider how these options can shake up your life and leave you with the results and next steps that you are searching for.

Books Reviews, Education, Reviews, Travel

National Geographic Almanac 2021 available in September

Erin Sluka

Comment: I was sent a copy of this Almanac. Affiliate links may be inside post. Opinions are my own!

National Geographic Almanac 2021 available in September

Coming next month, the National Geographic Almanac 2021 will release and boy what a year it has been! Can you guess some of the topics that will be covered for 2021? If you have not ever read through any of the annual Almanacs from National Geographic, you have missed so much from our world you probably were not aware of. The Almanac covers trending topics, big ideas in science, photos, maps and more.

From travel trends when you plan visits to Tokyo or other countries to learning what has been happening up in the sky with our solar system.

Then topics of humanity, nature, archeology and more. There is so much packed into this book with amazing photography that you would expect from National Geographic.

The 2021 Almanac is 400 pages long with quizzes and more for all ages. You can preorder your copy now for the release on September 22, 2020. Available at Amazon and other retailers.

Education, Reviews, Toy Reviews

EXIT The Game brings the escape room experience to your home (ages 10+)

Erin Sluka

Comment: I was sent these games. Thank you to Thames & Kosmos for collaborating with Parenting Healthy

EXIT: The Game brings the escape room experience to your home

Have you ever experienced an escape room event? If you have teens and need a party gathering idea, I challenge you to try an actual escape room. Its puzzles and riddles that get you out of the rooms and the faster you solve them the faster you move to the Exit. EXIT The Game are games for ages 10+ (depending on the version as some are 12+ and 16+). These bring the escape room to your home!

EXIT The Game

Anthony is 12 and we first learned about EXIT The Game from Thames and Kosmos when we visited Sweet Suite Toy Fair in NYC a few years back. Anthony was a tad young, had never experienced an escape room but I thought these looked so fun. Now he is a few years older and I finally got my hands on a few to try.

Once we realized how to solve page 1 riddle we began to make more sense and moved through the rest – yes, we had to use all 3 hint cards but this was our first attempt. We played House of Riddles rated for his age and it was challenging, a good thing! See how hard he is contemplating below…

escape room game

I have not dug into The Catacombs of Horror as that is an expert level ages 16+ but we will graduate to that soon enough. The riddles are fun and perhaps there is a bit of a theme to the set of riddles as you turn each page.

The instruction booklet worked well for us, but the best way to learn to play EXIT The Game is to download the Kosmos Helper App. In the app, you can find animated explanations of the instructions and other helpful features for a selection of Kosmos games. Available on iOS and Android devices,

EXIT game rules

This is such a great sleepover game for tweens and teens. If you like challenging games and to witness your older child’s level of problem solving the family game nights will surely be fun and challenged with any of the EXIT The Game sets. Available from Thames & Kosmos as well as retailers such as Amazon.

Education, Tips and Tricks

How we became debt free with tools like Pigly budget calculators

Erin Sluka

Comment: Proud to partner with Pigly. Story and opinions are 100% my own

How to plan finances, manage budgets, and plan for retirement with Pigly

14 years ago my husband and I had started a family together. He has 2 boys and they were young then and we had his mortgage and both of us had debt for cars, student loans, credit cards. We would often talk about starting to consolidate as we tackle our debt with grand images of a debt free future. Then we added a third boy as we had our son together.

Then notices we didn’t recognize began arriving in the mail. Someone opened a checking account up in my husbands name and had written very large checks to several retailers. We felt so defeated.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

As we began to repair the fraud (this was 2006 so it was done mainly by mail as the internet wasn’t as inclusive back then for banking), we learned a lot. We had been on the phone with claims and the bank and had been in to our branch enough that we started asking questions and they were noticing our debt. We realized that there is a way to get out of our debt and with time it looked promising. We did it all by ourselves. We did not hire anyone or pay for a service, we just busted out budget calculators (a lot) and bought a notebook and spent nights communicating and keeping on the same financial page as a couple.

How we became debt free with tools like Pigly budget calculators

Budget Calculators are the best tool

Today we have a mortgage and have been able to pay our middle son’s college expenses without loans and have begun saving for the youngest’s college. We own all of our cars and only keep 1 credit card for airline miles that we pay to a $0 balance each month to avoid interest. Credit companies actually hate us-lol. I have had friends approach asking advice and I can now send them to the websites hat did not exist for us but would have made things so much easier. Pigly is one of the best I have seen lately as a fantastic budgeting and savings tool. Pigly is a calculator portal where you can use their calculators for any planning or saving.

Whether you are starting a home buying or selling process or need to save for a child’s college you will find the budget calculators to help you plan. Best of all the site is free and ad free!

Pigly has a wide range of tools from budgeting, home loans, mortgages, savings, retirement planning and so on, so there is budget calculators relevant for just about everyone. 

I can tell you for certain that if you are committed and patient you will also be debt free in time and when that time comes there will be no greater feeling. If someone would have told me 15 years ago we’d own 3 cars, an RV, a home with only 11 years left on the mortgage and enough savings to retire (not ready yet) and put 2 children through college loan-free. If you were to tell me we’d have all that without credit card or loan debt, I would have chocked on laughter. But, here we are!

Start by gathering information and low interest, no balance transfer fee cards to consolidate onto. Pay off the lowest debts first to knock the amount of debt items down (I started in 2006 with my 8% student loan at 6K by taking our tax return to pay it off rather than a fancy trip with that money). Then meet weekly if you are a couple or take time by yourself if single with tools like a notebook and budget calculators and log into Pigly as you change/update your plan if anything new has hit or to discuss and plan for holidays and big events. Good luck!