Registered Nurse Jobs

For the license, yes: both degrees sit the same exam and earn the same license. The degree matters in hiring. Many hospitals ask for a BSN outright, or ask you to finish one within a few years of starting, and doing that as an RN-to-BSN while working is ordinary. Magnet requires every nurse manager to hold a nursing degree and the chief nursing officer a master's, with a nursing degree somewhere in the chain; for staff nurses it asks the hospital for its own improvement goal rather than a threshold.

A structured first year for new graduates, with a preceptor, classroom time, and a slower ramp onto the unit. Hospitals recruit residency cohorts on their own calendar, often twice a year, and those postings say new graduate where an ordinary opening would ask for years of experience.

Plenty do. Clinics, schools, home health and hospice, infusion centers, case management and utilization review all hire RNs, and most of them keep weekday hours instead of a 12-hour rotation.

The Nurse Licensure Compact covers RN and LPN licenses only. A nurse practitioner's RN license can be multistate under it, but the APRN license has to be issued by every state they practice in: a separate APRN compact has been enacted in 5 states and needs 7 before it starts, so today it does nothing. Our RN licensing guide has the mechanics of the nurse compact itself.

Set by the unit, and in 5 states written into a rule or a statute. California puts the full ladder in regulation, 1:2 in intensive care through 1:5 on med-surg; Oregon put numbers in statute in 2023; New Jersey sets 1:3 in critical care, tightened by acuity; Massachusetts and New York cover intensive care alone, Massachusetts at 1:1 or 1:2 by acuity and New York at 1:2 through a 2023 health department regulation. Other states, New York included, require a staffing committee or public reporting, and elsewhere the number is the employer's.

The life support set is standard and unit-dependent, starting with BLS and adding ACLS or PALS where the unit calls for it. The one that changes a career is specialty certification such as CCRN, which takes practice hours in the specialty before you can sit the exam and tends to appear as a preference on senior postings.