Browsing by Subject "career choice"

The aim of this integrative literature review was to clarify how international nursing studies have described nurses’ vocational choices and motivational factors related to it. This thesis examined nursing as an occupation and its requirements from the point of view of John L. Holland´s and Donald E. Super´s career choice theories. Deci’s and Ryan´s self-determination theory and Eccles´and Wigfield´s expectancy-value theory were applied to describe the motivation to become a nurse. The data of this study consisted of international nursing studies collected by using electronic reference databases. The inclusion and exclusion criteria and the search terms describing the nursing career choice and motivation were defined for the search. The final data included thirteen research articles examining nurses´ career choices and intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. The data was analysed using deductive and inductive content analysis. The results suggest that nursing profession requires versatile professional skills, autonomy, sense of responsibility and sociability. The most important motivators for becoming a nurse were the social nature of the work and the desire to take care of another person. Nurses also felt the need to become a part of a professional community from which they received support for their work. The most important extrinsic motivators were good employment and career opportunities and interesting work. Motivation-reducing factors were the business of the work, low income and low position in the organisation. For these reasons, nurses wanted to seek further education in order to get better and more flexible job opportunities. The study provides information of nurse´s career choice and the motivational factors behind it. Being familiar with the demands of nursing and the motivation factors behind career choices helps to recruit suitable people for nursing positions, and it is also important for the development of nurses´ work, so that the interest in this work is sustained as long as possible.