Assignment: Professional Organizations
Assignment: Professional Organizations
48 American Nurse Today Volume 12, Number 11 AmericanNurseToday.com
• Take advantage of your digital footprint to demonstrate your skills and experience.
Your online identity (including photos you post on Instagram, status updates and likes on Facebook, and Tweets) is a digital finger- print that reveals who you are, personally and professionally. And because an estimated 60% to 80% of employers do online searches of po- tential hires, your digital identity should not be taken lightly. Both students and practicing nurses should attend to their digital identities to ensure that they’re seen in a positive light by potential employers, academic institutions, colleagues, and patients. One way to create a positive online presence is by
crafting an ePortfolio, which is an online presentation of your academic and professional experiences and achievements. (See Why create an ePortfolio?) To build your ePortfolio, consider the platform you
want to use, how you’ll connect with other nursing professionals, and the content you should include.
Platform Before you start creating your ePortfolio, decide what platform best suits your needs. If you’re a student, your school may offer free access to platforms such as Port- folium or Pathbrite. Reach out to your career services center to find out if these options are available. Other platform options, for both students and prac-
ticing nurses, include social media and sites that allow you to create your own website. LinkedIn, for exam- ple, is a social media platform designed specifically for building career profiles and making professional con- nections. The downside is that it doesn’t allow for de- sign flexibility; your portfolio will look like everyone else’s. No matter which social media platform you use, take advantage of opportunities to connect to profes- sional organizations that align with your career goals.
Career Sphere
An ePortfolio, and the process of creating one, offers many benefits to students and nursing professionals. Here are just a few.
• For practicing nurses, reflecting on your experiences and skills will help you determine how prepared you are for the positions you’re seeking.
• For new graduates, reflecting on clinical and profession- al growth since admission to a nursing program and outlining short- and long-term goals will aid in building your career path.
You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.
Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.
Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.
The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.
