Abstract
Career advancement is a form of capacity building and a means of ensuring that professional nurses who have a desire for greater opportunities of career advancement have experience and a strong performance record. Career advancement is of core importance to and a motivation for professional nurses who aspire to occupy leadership positions within the institution (Bellerose, Awoonor-Williams, Alva, Magalona & Sacks, 2022: 2).
In the South African Department of Health there are leadership opportunities for professional nurses and these include being the chief executive officer of hospitals, leadership to serve on hospital boards, deputy manager in nursing, assistant manager, clinical heads and operational manager, to mention a few. However, the number of professional nurses in these leadership roles are few, because the perceived barriers to career advancement are contributory factors that hinder the progression of professional nurses into leadership positions. When professional nurses are not afforded opportunities of progression in the institution, the question would be, what are nurse manager’s doing to fulfil their duties of empowering and developing professional nurses, which is an objective of the nursing strategy.
The purpose of this study was to explore and describe the perceptions of professional nurses on their career advancement in a regional hospital in Gauteng and to develop recommendations to enhance their career advancement. A qualitative, exploratory and descriptive design that is contextual in nature was employed to explore and describe the perceptions of professional nurses. A purposive sampling method was used. The study was conducted in two phases. Phase 1 focused on the exploration and description of the perceptions of professional nurses regarding their career advancement and Phase 2 concentrated on the development of recommendations to enhance career advancement for professional nurses.
Data were collected by means of individual semi-structured interviews to get in-depth information on their perceptions. The collected data were transcribed verbatim and analysed using Tesch’s method of qualitative data analysis, from which one central theme emerged, namely the perception of professional nurses regarding their career advancement. Two main themes that emerged were the barriers to career advancement and emotional experiences related to career advancement. The main theme and subthemes were conceptualised into relevant literature and recommendations were developed to optimise career advancement. Trustworthiness was achieved through adherence to the criteria of credibility, dependability, confirmability, and transferability. The principles of ethical consideration were applied in this study to ensure the protection of human rights, which are autonomy, confidentiality, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice.