Career

Registered Nurse

A registered nurse is the person who watches a patient hour by hour: checking vital signs, giving medicines, noticing when something is going wrong, and telling the doctor before it turns into an emergency.

O*NET profile

Median pay (US)

$97,550

2025 · $46.90 an hour

O*NET source

Job outlook

Faster than average

O*NET's band for this category is 5% to 6%, 2024-2034

O*NET source

To get in the door

Bachelor's degree

Most of these occupations require a four-year bachelor's degree, but some do not.

Openings a year

189,100

projected, nationally

O*NET source

What the day actually looks like

Take vital signs and do a head-to-toe assessment on every assigned patient, then record it in the chart, which is a legal document (O*NET lists recording patient medical information and vital signs as a core task).
Give medications on schedule and watch for reactions, which means knowing the dose, the route, and what wrong looks like before it happens.
Track changes over the shift and escalate: O*NET lists monitoring and reporting changes in a patient's symptoms as a defining task, and 57 percent of RNs report that an uncorrected mistake would have extremely serious consequences.
Teach the patient and the family, from how to use an inhaler to what to watch for after discharge. O*NET rates Assisting and Caring for Others as the top work activity at importance 99.
Coordinate with physicians, pharmacy, and therapy, and supervise LPNs and nursing assistants on the team (O*NET core task 87, direct or supervise less-skilled nursing or healthcare personnel).

Skills you need first

Biology and anatomy and physiology strong enough to earn a B in college A&P I and II. Cleveland State requires a B or better in both, and Kent State gates entry to its nursing sequence on a 2.750 science GPA.
Chemistry. Kent State requires high school chemistry to be admitted and a college chemistry course to progress; Cleveland State requires Chemistry I and II at C or better.
Math you can do accurately under pressure, because dosage calculation is ratio and proportion work with a patient attached to it. Cleveland State requires college-level math at a B or better.
Reading and writing dense material quickly and precisely. Charting is a legal record, and a vague note is a real problem.
Talking to strangers who are scared, in pain, or angry. O*NET reports 42 percent of RNs deal with unpleasant or angry people every day and 38 percent face conflict situations daily.
Physical stamina and tolerance for close contact. O*NET reports 45 percent of RNs work at very close, near-touching physical proximity and 61 percent are exposed to disease or infections every day.

How long people stay

Turnover, not job scarcity, is the risk in this career. NCSBN's 2024 National Nursing Workforce Study (published April 17, 2025, roughly 800,000 nurses surveyed) found 39.9 percent of RNs intend to leave the workforce or retire within the next five years, that about 41.5 percent of those planning to leave named stress and burnout as the root cause, and that more than 138,000 nurses left the workforce since 2022. The same study reported workloads down 20 to 25 percent since 2022, so the picture was improving rather than fixed. The load is documented on O*NET: 61 percent of RNs exposed to disease or infections every day, 57 percent saying an uncorrected mistake would be extremely serious, and 42 percent dealing with unpleasant or angry people daily. An average career length in years was not verified.

Where it is needed, and the different ways to do it

Nursing is one of the largest occupations in health care and the openings are real, but this page will not promise you a shortage it cannot document. O*NET OnLine, republishing BLS Employment Projections, reports about 3,391,000 RN jobs in 2024, an outlook of 'Faster than average (5% to 6%)' for 2024-2034, and about 189,100 openings projected each year on average over the decade, most of them from nurses retiring or leaving rather than from newly created positions. That is the whole of what we could verify on a page that loads. An earlier draft of this page carried detailed federal shortage projections, including national shortage percentages and a rural-versus-metro comparison, sourced to a HRSA workforce brief. Those numbers had no working link and the HRSA site blocked every attempt to read them, so they have been removed rather than repeated. What that means for a family: treat "there is a nursing shortage" as a claim to check locally, by asking Cleveland-area hospitals and the programs below what their own hiring and placement looks like, rather than as a national guarantee.

Hospital floor: med-surg, ICU, emergency

The setting most people picture, and the one where the highest acuity and the most alarms live. Hospitals run around the clock, so floor nursing means nights, weekends, and holidays are part of the rotation. Named as an RN setting in the CareerOneStop career video.

Physician offices and outpatient clinics

Named in the CareerOneStop RN career video. A clinic that does not provide 24-hour care generally runs on office hours, which is why this route attracts nurses who want a predictable schedule.

Home health care

Named in the CareerOneStop RN career video. One patient at a time, in their own house, with driving between visits and far less backup within arm's reach.

Nursing and residential care facilities

Named in the CareerOneStop RN career video. Round-the-clock shift coverage like a hospital, but with long-term relationships with the same residents over months and years.

Schools

CareerOneStop's RN video names schools as an RN setting. A school nurse handles asthma and diabetes management, injuries, screenings, and medication administration for a whole building or district.

Correctional facilities and the military

CareerOneStop's RN video specifically notes that some registered nurses work in correctional facilities or serve in the military, two settings with their own credentialing and security requirements.

AI and this career

exposure: moderate

The documentation and alerting layers of nursing are heavily exposed to AI. The hands-on assessment, the physical care, and the legal accountability are not. The realistic near-term effect is a shift in what nurses spend their attention on rather than a reduction in how many nurses are needed, and the professional body that governs the work has already written down that AI does not replace nursing judgment.

Tasks likely to change

Charting. Ambient listening tools that draft notes are moving into the exact systems nurses already use; O*NET lists Epic Systems and MEDITECH among core RN software. A JAMA Network Open study of ambient scribe technology at a Philadelphia academic health system, covering 46 clinicians, found time in notes per appointment dropped 20.4 percent (10.3 to 8.2 minutes) and after-hours work dropped 30.0 percent. The honest caveat: those participants were ambulatory clinicians, not bedside RNs.
Alert triage. Predictive sepsis, fall, and deterioration models push scores at nurses all shift. External validation of the most widely deployed proprietary sepsis model, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, found an area under the curve of 0.63 (95% CI 0.62-0.64) and alerts on 6,971 of 38,455 hospitalizations, about 18 percent. Deciding which alerts are real is becoming a named nursing skill rather than a background annoyance.
Patient education and discharge material. The American Nurses Association's position statement already treats prompts in the electronic health record and decision-support tools as legitimate AI in nursing practice, with the nurse responsible for checking and adapting whatever the tool produces before it reaches a patient.
Bias checking. The ANA position statement warns that population- and system-level data mined from domains with significant systemic racism and bias will likely carry that same bias into implementation, and calls that contrary to ethical nursing practice. That makes questioning a model's output part of a nurse's ethical obligation, not somebody else's IT problem.

Tasks that stay human

Hands-on assessment and physical care. O*NET reports 45 percent of RNs work at very close, near-touching physical proximity and 61 percent are exposed to disease or infections every day. Starting an IV, turning a patient, or feeling that an abdomen has gone rigid has no remote version.
Accountability for the decision. The ANA position statement quotes the Code of Ethics directly: systems and technologies that assist in clinical practice are adjunct to, not replacements for, the nurse's knowledge and skill, and nurses remain accountable for their practice even in instances of system or technology failure. AI does not replace a nurse's decision-making, judgment, critical thinking, or assessment skills.
Catching what the model missed. In the JAMA Internal Medicine validation, the sepsis model failed to identify 1,709 of 2,552 patients who developed sepsis, about 67 percent. The nurse who notices a patient looks wrong before any score fires is the safety net, and the arithmetic says that safety net is doing most of the work.
Presence and hard conversations. O*NET rates Assisting and Caring for Others as the single most important RN work activity at importance 99, and 42 percent of RNs deal with unpleasant or angry people every day. Sitting with a frightened family at 2 a.m. is the job, not overhead to be optimized away.

What registered nurse work may look like

A shift eight years from now may still open the way it opens today, with a hand on a wrist and a look at a face. What may change is the paperwork tail behind it. The room may listen, drafting the assessment note while the nurse works, so that the nurse's job becomes reading that draft carefully enough to catch what it got wrong. The monitors may get louder and more opinionated, pushing sepsis and fall and deterioration scores into the workflow, and judging those alerts may become a skill nurses are hired and evaluated on, since the most widely deployed sepsis model missed roughly two thirds of cases in outside testing and a nurse who trusts it blindly is a hazard to patients. What likely does not move is who signs. Nursing's own ethics code already says the technology is adjunct to the nurse's knowledge, never a replacement, and that the nurse stays accountable even when the system fails. The likeliest version of this job carries less typing, more verifying, and the same 3 a.m. call about whether the patient in bed 12 is getting worse.

Sources:[1][2][3][4][5]

Open questions on this career

We changed the job growth figure from a flat 5 percent to the range the source actually prints, 'faster than average, 5 to 6 percent.' Narrowing a published range to one number is a small thing that reads as more certain than the evidence is.
We updated the Tri-C link to the current address for the nursing Generic Track admission page. The old one still worked but redirected.
Ohio Board of Nursing licensure requirements, application fees, and background-check costs were not verified.

Pay and outlook come from O*NET, the US Department of Labor's occupation site, and every figure links back to it. We do not publish tuition or cost figures here: those change often, so use each school's own page and phone number below. Tell Mr. Mendoza if anything looks wrong.

See somebody do it

Registered Nurses Career VideoCareerOneStop, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration A Day in the Life of a Nursing Student | Bryan College of Health SciencesBryan Health (Bryan College of Health Sciences)

Where you can train for it

4 programs

Read these as minimums, not targets.Meeting the numbers below is what lets you apply; it is not what gets you in. Selective programs admit far fewer people than apply, and admitted students are usually well above the minimum. Call the program and ask what last year's admitted class actually looked like. That one phone call is worth more than any number on this page.

Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C)

Cleveland, OH · Associate of Applied Science (AAS) in Nursing. The same page also lists a Certificate of Proficiency in Practical Nursing after the first year and State Tested Nurse Aide (STNA) certification after prerequisite courses.

Nursing Program, Generic Track

What they ask for

Overall GPA of 2.75 or higher. The page states the Division of Nursing does not round GPAs.
Generic Track applicants must take the Health Education Systems Inc. Admission Assessment Exam-A2 (HESI A2).
High school diploma, GED equivalency, or higher degree transcript on file with the Registrar, and completion of all prerequisite coursework.
Background check that includes fingerprinting and court search (BCI), plus health requirements and immunizations.
No application deadline is posted. The page states acceptance is granted on a first-come, space-available basis.

The only associate degree on this list and the one option inside the city at a community college. Kent State publishes an RN-to-BSN bridge for nurses who start with an associate degree, so this is a real on-ramp rather than a dead end. Email listed on the page: nursing@tri-c.edu. For what it costs, use Tri-C's own tuition page rather than a figure quoted here.

Program page 216-987-4067

Cleveland State University

Cleveland, OH · Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN)

Traditional BSN Program, School of Nursing

What they ask for

Maintain an overall prerequisite GPA of at least 3.0 and a cumulative GPA of at least 2.50.
Anatomy and Physiology I and II, Microbiology, and college-level mathematics each require a B or better. Chemistry I and II, English I and II, and Ethics require a C or better.
Must have successfully completed two of the science prerequisites at the time of application submission.
Deadline is March 1 for the fall cohort and September 1 for the spring cohort.
Application packet includes the School of Nursing application, fee, transcripts, two recommendations, and a resume. Selection also involves an interview and an essay written at the time of the interview.

Downtown on Euclid Avenue, with the program housed in the Center for Innovation in Medical Professions. The B requirement in anatomy and physiology and microbiology is the real gate, which is why high school biology and chemistry matter years before the application. Email listed: csuschoolofnursing@csuohio.edu. For tuition, go to the CSU bursar's own page.

Program page (216) 687-3598

Kent State University

Kent, OH · Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN)

Nursing B.S.N., Traditional Entry concentration, College of Nursing

What they ask for

New students need either a minimum 2.700 overall high school GPA plus a minimum 22 ACT composite or 1100 SAT, or a minimum 3.000 overall high school GPA with no test score.
Applicants must have completed high school-level mathematics, biology and chemistry.
To advance into the Professional Nursing Sequence: minimum 2.750 overall GPA, minimum 2.750 GPA in the required sciences (BSCI 20021 or BSCI 30171, BSCI 21010, BSCI 21020, and CHEM 10050 or 10055 or 10060), and a minimum C in each prerequisite course.
The catalog states that admission to the Traditional Entry concentration is selective, that the process is competitive, and that acceptance is never guaranteed. Admission into the Professional Nursing Sequence uses a holistic process that considers personal experiences, attributes and metrics.
Application timing is not listed on this page. Ask the College of Nursing directly for the current application window before you plan around a cycle.

The only program here that publishes an actual high school GPA and test-score threshold, which makes it the clearest number to aim at starting in 10th grade. Those thresholds are in the university catalog, which is the page linked here; the College of Nursing's own admissions page does not list them. Kent State also lists an accelerated 15-month sequence for second-degree students, an LPN and allied health to BSN bridge, and an RN-to-BSN bridge. Email listed: nursing@kent.edu.

Program page 330-672-7930

Case Western Reserve University

Cleveland, OH · Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN)

Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN), Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing

What they ask for

Students interested in nursing apply through the CWRU Office of Undergraduate Admission and are accepted to the university. The school states there is no second application.
The program offers direct admission to the undergraduate nursing program, and the page states there are no pre-nursing requirements.
Because there is no separate nursing application, the actual gate is CWRU's general first-year admission standard, which the nursing program page does not itemize. Prospective students have to get that from undergraduate admission at 216.368.4450 or.

A private research university in University Circle, walking distance from several of Cleveland's major hospitals. Direct admission means no second competition once you are in, which is unusual and valuable. It is also the most expensive option here by a wide margin, and CWRU's cost page lists an additional nursing fee on top of tuition, so run the university's own net price calculator instead of reading a sticker price off this page. Program director and admissions contacts listed on the page: cac43@case.edu and admissionsfpb@case.edu.

Program page 216.368.4700

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