Hitting the Nursing Faculty Shortage Head On: Strategies to Recruit, Retain, and Develop Nursing Faculty

• We provide an overview of the nursing faculty shortage.
• A variety of strategies to build the nursing faculty workforce are described.
• We address nursing faculty retention strategies, challenges, and lessons learned.
• A unique approach to preparing a diverse nursing faculty workforce is described, along with details of how we got started, challenges, and future directions.

More than ever before, schools of nursing are challenged with finding qualified faculty to teach growing numbers of undergraduate and graduate students. Qualified applicants by the thousands are being turned away, in large part because of an insufficient pipeline of faculty. This article describes how one school hit the shortage head on by creating alternate models for employing and growing new faculty, and then instituting a variety of strategies to develop and keep them.