Aim: The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between the professional values of nursing students and career plans and to evaluate the factors that affect them.
Material and Method: This descriptive and cross-sectional study was conducted with 324 students who were studying in the third class and senior of a nursing undergraduate program at a state university in Izmir and who agreed to participate in the study. The data were collected by the researchers using the Individual Characteristics Form, the Nurse’s Professional Values Scale-Revision and the Career Future Scale with face-to-face interview method. Evaluation of the data were used Descriptive statistics, Mann-Whitney U, Kruskal Wallis, IndependentSamples T test, variance analysis and correlation analysis.
Results: The mean age of the students who participated in the study was 21.88 ± 1.25 years, 53.4% of the students are senior, 73.5% are women, 53.4% of them have health personnel in the family, 63% had voluntarily choosed the nursing department and 56.2% preferred the department as the first choice. They stated that 41.1% of the students prefer to have a nursing profession because they like it and 42.5% of them want to work as a clinical nurse postgraduation. The Nurse’s Professional Values Scale and Career Future Scale mean total score of students who voluntarily choose the nursing department were found to be higher than those of students who did not (p=0.005; p=0.000). The students who have health personnel (p = 0.041) in their family or relatives and students who prefer nursing department because they like nursing profession (p = 0.000) have higher mean total scores on the Career Future Scale. The Nurse’s Professional Values Scale (p=0.042) and Career Future Scale (p=0.000) total score mean of the nursing students who wanted to work as a supervisor postgraduation and who want to become academicians were the highest. There was a poor positive correlation between the mean scores of Nurse’s Professional Values Scale and the mean score of Career Future Scale (p <0.05).
Conclusion: The professional values such as sacrifice, equality, freedom, human dignity and justice that the student possesses are an important factor in planning career postgraduation and in the process of professional socialization. According to the findings obtained from the research, prefering to profession voluntarily and gladly is effective both in acquiring professional values and in career planning. For this reason, the values and future of the nursing profession should be introduced to the candidates of the university, whereas in undergraduate education, nursing students need to acquire the professional values of the profession from the first years.