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NURSING AND HEALTHCARE

APTITUDES

One way to get a sense of your aptitudes is to do a sort of “archeological
dig” on your life work so far, including paid work, volunteer projects, school
activities, and any other engagements where you brought your talents to
bear in a way that was meaningful and enjoyable to you.

Consider the following list of some possible aptitudes for you in relation
to the work you’ve found rewarding in the past. Which best reflect what
you’ve engaged in when you had the greatest sense of enjoyment and
competence?
• Comforting someone in pain

• Analyzing and synthesizing patient information

• Training or teaching, either patients or fellow nurses
• Organizing and managing an organization’s medical records
• Creating information systems

• Sharing information with and counseling patients

• Performing some other type of work related to nursing delivery
Have your career choices thus far reflected these aptitudes? How might
they form the core of your professional work going forward? You might
want to jot down your answers somewhere so that you can use them
to build your best-potential-career profile as you move through your
explorations.

Identifying your nursing/healthcare aptitudes will provide a starting point for
building a career based on your natural gifts — the ones from which you
derive the greatest joy.

In a broader career sense, you have other aptitudes that play across many
professional environments. You may be a natural leader and have strong
powers of persuasion, or an ability to see opportunities before they’re
evident to others. Although to some extent aptitudes can be taught as skills
to those who don’t possess them naturally, for now your goal is to describe
those areas of easy intersection between your natural gifts and and what
you most enjoy doing. Identifying those aptitudes will help you frame
possible career opportunities.
Innate strengths. In an alternative spin on aptitudes, in their popular
management book Now Discover Your Strengths (Gallup Press, 2001),
authors Buckingham and Clifton identified 34 “themes” or strengths — such
as achiever, analytical, deliberative, developer, futuristic, ideation, learner,
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6 | Transforming Healthcare Through Education