Nurse shortage has become an ongoing and urgent problem worldwide. The high turnover rate of new nurses, who are the primary backup personnel for the nursing force, exacerbates the possibility of this situation. Transition shock has been demonstrated to be critical in influencing new nurses’ retention intention. However, the mechanisms underlying this impact remain unclear. This study aims to explore transition shock’s effect mechanism on retention intention among new nurses, and to clarify the career calling’s mediating role and the resilience’s moderating role in this relationship. This is a multicenter cross-sectional study. From January 28 to February 20, 2024, an online questionnaire survey was administered among 739 new nurses from 11 hospitals in Shanxi Province, China, using convenience sampling. The survey included a demographic information questionnaire, the Transition Shock of Newly Graduated Nurses Scale, the Medical Staff Resilience Scale, the Career Calling Scale, and the Nurses’ Intention to Stay Scale. The data were analyzed using descriptive analysis, Pearson correlation analysis, and the PROCESS Macro Model 4 and 7 for the regression. Transition shock was significantly negatively correlated with retention intention (p < 0.001). Career calling played a partial mediating role between transition shock and retention intention, accounting for 63.53% of the total effect. Further, resilience moderated transition shock’s effect on career calling; thereby, a moderated mediation model was developed. Transition shock reduces retention intention by decreasing new nurses’ levels of career calling, while resilience moderates this mechanism. Nursing managers can adopt measures to increase retention intention among new nurses by reducing their transition shock and enhancing their career calling education and resilience training. This study was registered with the Chinese Clinical Trial Registry ( http://www.chictr.org/cn/ ) under the following ID: ChiCTR2400080373.

Objectives: This study aimed to investigate the current status of career calling among novice nurses, to identify potential subtypes and their population characteristics, and to further explore the factors associated with the different subtypes. Methods: A cross-sectional descriptive study was used. From January to February 2024, 845 novice nurses from 11 hospitals in Shanxi Province were selected for an online questionnaire survey using convenience sampling. The demographic questionnaire, transition shock of newly graduated nurses scale, medical staff resilience scale, and career calling scale were used as study instruments. Latent profile analysis (LPA) was used to explore the subtypes of novice nurses’ career calling, and multifactorial logistic regression was used to analyze the related factors of novice nurses’ career calling. Results: Three subtypes of career calling of novice nurses in this study were identified, namely, lacking-calling group (10.3%), stable-calling group (50.0%), and sufficient-calling group (39.7%). Education, weekly working hours, weekly frequency of night shifts, reasons for choosing nursing, level of transition shock, and level of resilience were significantly associated with the three latent profiles of career calling of novice nurses in this study. Conclusion: Novice nurses’ career calling presents 3 latent profiles and is heterogeneous in this study. Nursing administrators could pay attention to the differences in the level of career calling of novice nurses and adopt targeted management strategies based on the type of characteristics of the population in order to improve the level of career calling of novice nurses, help them develop their careers, and stabilize the nursing workforce.