Have you ever wondered, as a nurse practitioner or a nurse, what else can I do with my nursing skills?
Maybe you’ve gotten to a point where you’re tired of seeing patients in the hospital, or you’re just looking for something different. You’ve thought about administration, maybe going back to school, research, all the options in front of you. And then maybe, just maybe, you had a thought about working in the IT world.
And you thought to yourself, I don’t know IT. I don’t know technology. I don’t know how to code. There’s no way I can work in health IT.
Think again.
I had the same thought when I first started learning what informatics was. But last year, I found myself at a crossroads, trying to figure out what to do next.
Another Pivot
If you’ve been following my journey, you know I’ve had several pivots. I have done critical care, outpatient, and emergency room nursing. As a Nurse Practitioner, I went into leadership. I pivoted from a sabbatical into entrepreneurship, and most recently, I landed in a part-time clinical role while I pursued my business.
But as many entrepreneurs will tell you, there comes a time when the bills start stacking up. By August 2025, the numbers weren’t adding up. What I was building didn’t seem like the best fit for what was going on in the world, and I had to pivot again.
The easy pivot would have been to go back to clinical full-time. But that wasn’t for me.
I knew I liked working with technology and finding ways to make systems easier. I was interested in improving systems, and I was curious about how AI could shift the way we work in healthcare. I needed to figure out how to use my skills to get there.
That’s where George came in.
Who’s George? He’s my AI agent. And George helped me figure out every part of how to move forward, specifically for me.
It Wasn’t Just “Find a Job”
I talk a lot about lifestyle design, so it wasn’t just I need a job. The type of work mattered, and so did how I work.
So often we look at the money, the benefits, the title, and the role. However, I learned through my sabbatical and my journey that those are only pieces of it. If I like the job but it’s taking my weekends and my evenings and I can’t actually live my life, then I don’t want that job.
Here are the five things George helped me do, and he can help you too.
1. Uncover the skills you don’t realize you have
Look at the skills on a typical nursing resume. You’ll see clinical tasks and procedures. But how does that translate to other industries?
So George and I sat down, and our first task was to find the skills I had that weren’t obvious to me. I gave George my resume and CV, and it came back with: you have expertise in critical thinking, emotional intelligence, leadership. Then I asked it to ask me more questions so we could pull out even more.
I wanted to capture everything I had done in my 20+ year career, not just the things that felt memorable from the last few years.
2. Get clear on what you want next
From everything I have been reading and learning, I made a list of what I was interested in: AI in healthcare, systems improvement, well-being, and things that help clinicians work better, easier, and more efficiently, not harder.
But I also had specifics. I wanted a 9 to 5. I didn’t want to be on call. I didn’t want to work weekends. I definitely wanted vacation. And I wanted to support a mission and a culture that actually fit me, instead of me trying to fit it. (That seems to be an ongoing theme in my lifestyle design.)
This mattered more than I realized, because as jobs started coming up, some of them just didn’t fit those factors.
3. Explore what kinds of roles actually fit
With my skills on one side and my wants on the other, we got to the next question: what types of roles make sense for me right now? I didn’t want to work clinically, and I didn’t necessarily want to work in a hospital. I have spent most of my career there. I understand how hospitals work. I wanted something different.
That’s where health IT came up. George basically said: You want to learn more about AI in healthcare. You want systems work. You want well-being to be part of it. These are the types of roles you should be looking for.
And this wasn’t AI just spitting out an answer and telling me where to work. It was co-creation. It felt like working through the next step with someone.
As I went through the process I realized, in every career pivot I have ever made, people helped me. Whether they told me about their roles or pointed me toward openings, it always took support or someone giving me some guidance
The moment health IT came up, I got excited, which I think is important. I believe in doing work you actually enjoy at least 80% of the time. It’s such a gift to see people make a living doing something that lights them up, instead of doing something just because they have to. What’s the purpose of a job that makes you miserable for the rest of your life?
4. Search for the right titles (hint: they don’t say “nurse”)
This is the step that really showed me why it’s so hard for nurses to find jobs in other industries.
If I put my resume and my NP title into LinkedIn, Indeed, or Google, what comes back? Nurse practitioner jobs. You’d be great as an NP in this facility or in this unit. Yet,I have more than clinical skills. What about all the soft skills we build as nurses? How do I find a job that needs those?
So George and I looked for the actual titles of the roles I wanted. And here’s what I learned: none of them had “nurse” in the title. Not one.
They said “clinical” or “healthcare,” and then under the requirements, you’d see RN, BSN, MSN, or DNP.
If there’s one thing you take from this post, let it be this: if you’re thinking about shifting roles, don’t only search for jobs with “nurse” in the title. Look for “clinical” or “healthcare” roles that list an RN, BSN, MSN, or DNP as a requirement. It will broaden your search tremendously.
5. Set up your search, and validate every role
Once I had the titles, I set up job alerts, mostly on LinkedIn and Indeed, with the roles I wanted and my must-haves: remote or hybrid, clinical titles, in health IT. Every day I’d get five to seven jobs that matched.
As I looked through them, I started noticing the companies that came up and wondered, what about the ones that are not on the major job boards? So George and I went looking for companies already doing the kind of work I wanted to do. That was a game changer. It opened my eyes to so many health IT companies doing amazing work. I would review their sites, look at their company culture (really important to me), and check for openings. That’s actually how I found the company I ended up applying to six times, but that’s a story for another day.
Then came the most important part: validation.
Every role that looked interesting, I dropped into George and asked: Does this meet everything I said I wanted? Sometimes it was a good fit. Sometimes it wasn’t.
Because what’s the point of saying you want something, chasing a job that isn’t quite it, landing it, and then realizing, wait, that’s not what I said I wanted?
For example, I found a health IT implementation role that sounded really cool. The description fit, and while I didn’t meet every requirement, that’s okay. You can learn on the job if you’re open to it (and I was always upfront about that in interviews). But it required 80% travel. That’s essentially traveling every week.
Now, I love to travel, but for leisure. I like being home and relaxed. I like eating food I’ve prepared. The money looked right, the title looked good, the work looked good, but it didn’t fit the life I wanted.
The Right Job Will Find You
I won’t pretend this was a quick and easy process. It took several months. I applied to a lot of roles and got a lot of rejections. With each one, George helped me tweak my resume for the specific job.
But here’s what I noticed: with all those other jobs, I kept having to reshape my resume to fit. With the job I actually got, I didn’t have to change a thing. I was already a fit, because I had been doing the work to prepare for it all along.
Sometimes we want this big thing and don’t know how to get there. Trust me, I run into that all the time. But my biggest takeaway from this whole search is this:
The right job will find you, as long as you’re patient, doing the work, and staying true to what you want.
In my next post, I’ll share what a day in the life looks like as a clinical informaticist, which is now my role.
Want George’s help with your own search? Leave a comment or send me a message, and I’ll share the prompt I used.
Until then, take care, and take breaks.