Do I need special nursing qualifications?

Your nursing qualifications and any specialist training you have undertaken may not be the exact equivalent of what is required or offered of registered nurses in the country to which you are moving.

Most countries have a service you can use that will work out what your qualifications are equivalent to in their education system. For example, you can contact NARIC in the UK and they will check your international nursing qualifications against the UK standards and issue you a report.

Even if your qualifications do not transfer exactly, you will most likely be able to register as a general adult nurse. Once you are working in a nursing position overseas, you can explore whether you would like to upgrade your nursing qualifications by up-skilling in a new specialism.

Where can I get a nursing job overseas?

Most developing countries are suffering from an increasingly severe nursing shortage. They simply are not training enough nurses each year to replace the nurses that are reaching retirement age. This is an immediate problem for countries which also have an aging population who are putting more strain on the health systems in those countries.

Countries like the USA, the UK, Australia and New Zealand all have a significant number of internationally educated nurses already working in their health systems. And there are still many vacancies that nursing recruiters are unable to fill!

If you are already a registered nurse at home, moving your nursing career overseas to any English speaking country is only limited by your ability to speak the language well enough to pass the required English language test. Similarly, if you are a qualified nurse who is fluent in a language other than English, Arabic or Cantonese for example – there are many nursing vacancies abroad in the United Arab Emirates or Singapore.

Nursing Jobs Overseas Opportunities for Foreign Nurses in the United States

If you are looking to move your nursing abroad to the United States of America, then now is the time to do it. Hospitals in the USA are experiencing a staffing crisis, and this crisis is predicted to become worse over the next decade.

The nursing shortage in the USA is said to be caused by the many factors. On one hand there are many nurses reaching retirement age or choosing to retire early, and there simply aren’t enough newly graduated nurses to fill all the gaps. And there is more strain being placed on existing medical staff because of the bubble of baby boomers reaching retirement.

This is great news for internationally educated nurses because they can now find nursing positions in US hospitals with ease. Hospital administrators are aggressively recruiting foreign nurses.

To nurse in the US, legally, there are many papers to fill out and different states have different rules. In order to qualify to register as a nurse in any state in the US you must meet the following criteria:

• undertaken post high school nursing education. This means you must have graduated high school and then gone on to do your nursing qualification afterwards.
  
  
• be a registered nurse or hold a license to nurse at home. This means that you are legally allowed to practice nursing in the country where you trained or the country where you currently live.
  
  
• have 1 year experience nursing in your specialty. If you aren’t a specialist nurse in, for example, paediatric nursing, psychiatric nursing, neo natal nursing, etc, your specialty would be as an adult nurse.
  
  
• be able to communicate clearly in English. If English is not your first language, you will be required to provide evidence of your ability to communicate to the required standard. This means that you’ll have to take an English language test in speaking, reading, writing and listening.

Should you meet these 4 critical pre-application criteria, you can be assured that you’re a good candidate for getting a nursing job in the United States.