Nurse Specialization in the Age of AI: Skills That Transfer Across Careers

Editor’s note: The author is Dean of the College of Nursing at University of Phoenix. Nurse.org generates student referrals for the school through its education marketing business, but received no compensation for this article and retained full editorial control.

As nurses seek opportunities to advance their careers, as well as hone their practice and become even better care providers, they do so in an environment transformed by new factors, including AI and other tech advancements. But healthcare needs have continued to evolve as well.

Consider, for example, geriatrics: America’s aging population means there will be a greater need for nurses with the skills to provide elder care and treat this rising demographic. Yet too few nurses are seeking to develop these skills, creating a troubling gap on the horizon, with some predicting a need for 50% more geriatricians by 2030, the year the youngest baby boomer will turn 65.

This is the type of continuing education that nurses seeking to advance their careers may be interested in: developing specific skillsets that provide career pathways for nurses with unique capabilities, all while developing skills that can more broadly apply to other positions in nursing and healthcare. How, then, to develop these skills? Fortunately, in a world of AI, emerging technology, and nursing specialization, nurses have more options to pursue individual skills that advance their knowledge in one field and are transferable to other disciplines. Continuing education to develop special skills can be a powerful tool to become a more focused caregiver as well as a more versatile one.

Want to see more Nurse.org articles in your Google results? Add us as a preferred source.

Nurses interested in skill development will often look to specialty programs, such as a BSN, and evaluate their choices based on criteria for course offerings, content, length, and career pathway opportunities. One approach is to consider a program’s guiding values or philosophy, and its individual courses, which offer windows into how specifically a program can connect to a nurse’s focus area. For example, are there courses that focus on geriatric population needs and care? Does the program describe a philosophy that matches your own priorities as a nurse, whether that’s patient-centered care, safety culture, leadership development, or treating patients as partners in their own care? (RAELENE: we reworded this sentence so the values read as the reader’s evaluation criteria rather than any one school’s list.)

Moreover, with the rise of AI and other tech-forward solutions, nurses have the option to hone focus areas by considering not just programs or courses, but the unit of knowledge that underlies them: skills.

Consider, for example, telehealth, which can be particularly important to less-mobile seniors who may require regular check-ins; it can be even more effective when coupled with ambient listening to transcribe during appointments, as well as transcription programs that can help patients with hearing limitations. Nurses interested in geriatrics can practice with these tools, in a classroom, the workplace, or elsewhere, to build their special skillsets and open new career pathways.

The same can be said of wearables, another advancing technology that can feed continuous data to care teams as well as digital health tools to patients. Nurses experienced with these tools can readily connect them to geriatrics, even if they learned or practiced with them in another context.

These skills, while important for geriatrics, are not unique to that field. Telehealth can be important for rural healthcare providers, where clinics are not as accessible; AI transforms population health in nursing by using predictive analytics to spot high-risk groups, automate routine outreach, and track chronic conditions in real time.

Rural patients also face mobility and travel limitations, as well as less access to broadband internet or other technologies. Nurses looking to care for these populations may find themselves building the same telehealth and AI skills found in a geriatric program. These overlaps are increasingly reflected in how nursing curricula are developed, with programs pairing population-specific content, such as geriatrics, with skillsets in population health, AI, and telehealth. (RAELENE: your draft said “how we develop curricula”; we generalized to the field.)

Developing specific skills can, then, produce more well-rounded and versatile caregivers. A nurse focusing on geriatrics can bring transferable skills to rural care, and vice versa. Nurses with varying experiences can find footholds in other fields, discovering new opportunities and advancing our understanding of how these areas are medically connected.

>>Listen to The Latest Nurse News Podcast

Skill development is an important opportunity for nursing managers and other healthcare decision-makers to diversify the experience and contributions of their workforce. More skills and deeper knowledge position nurses to deliver better care.

Nurses can begin developing skills right where they are: their current practice setting, patient care opportunities, and colleagues or leaders who can help them learn different and specialized skills on the job. For example, a nurse interested in geriatrics might ask their leadership for a geriatric-focused assignment and concentrate on geriatric-related comorbidities. Another opportunity is to discover the quality improvement goals of their practice setting; there are often geriatric-related safety and quality initiatives already underway.

Nurses enrolled in a program or courses can seek to apply the skills they learn in real time, in the workplace. In this way, a nurse’s skills become a workplace’s skills: they put them into practice immediately, allowing them to educate their peers and bring new insights to the team.

For this reason, nursing leaders must consider the environment outside their own practice space and be prepared to incorporate new skills and specializations into their workforce, especially as demand for nurses continues to grow. Nurses share a common core value of serving our individual patients, families, communities, and populations. Nurses pursuing special skill development are some of the most valuable assets a team can have, and nurturing them means being in a better position to address population health, individuals, and communities.

🤔 What skill have you built in one specialty that unexpectedly opened a door in another? Share your thoughts in the comments below.