Job Description

Join UChicago Medicine, as a Clinical Nurse Educator (RN) in our Adult Medical Multispecialty Units.

As a Clinical Nurse Educator, you will design, develop, implement, and evaluate a variety of educational offerings in order to improve nursing care and clinical/organizational outcomes.

In this role, the Clinical Nurse Educator is a nurse with previous educational experience whose focus is on staff development and nursing education. This nurse is an educator, consultant, role model, staff/patient advocate, change agent, leader and cost effective professional. The Clinical Nurse Educator elevates the standard of professional nursing practice at UCM by developing, coaching and mentoring staff to become expert clinicians and leaders. 

Essential Job Functions

• Utilizes standardized and develops customized assessment tools and testing methodologies to measure staff knowledge and skill in core nursing practices and within specialty areas.
• Collects data regarding employee learning needs, at least annually, through the methods of observation, interviewing, focus groups and instrumentation.
• Interprets accrediting and regulatory agencies’ guidelines as a basis for identifying education and training needs.
• Interprets the medical center’s strategic imperatives, policies, guidelines, and other internal demands in order to design education that supports these strategic goals and key objectives.
• Leads the development of tactics to achieve the organization’s strategic vision for education.
• Offers recommendations for the deployment of educational resources to enable the achievement of organizational goals.
• Interprets health care trends and incorporates current research into the design of learning needs assessments and the identification of learning needs.
• Collaborates with key staff to develop a comprehensive annual educational calendar.
• Designs core nursing competencies that cross the continuum of clinical expertise and practice, using essential criteria such as: clinical judgment, advocacy/moral agency, caring practices, facilitation of learning, collaboration, systems thinking, response to diversity, clinical inquiry, and contemporary standards of practice and care.
• Designs specialty based orientations for clinical staff.
• Designs inservices and continuing education programs for staff.
• Participates in the design of centralized and unit-based preceptor education and development initiatives.
• Prepares educational objectives, lesson plans, handouts, self-learning modules, instructional manuals, and tests for programs.
• Applies for nursing contact hour (CE) approval for appropriate coursework.
• Designs programs that use a variety of learning methods and technology.
• Skillfully employs the full spectrum of adult learning techniques.
• Conducts a variety of learning events, based on needs assessment findings, using a variety of teaching-learning strategies
• Serves as faculty in organization wide education events, as appropriate.
• Evaluates all learning activities using objective performance criteria and recommends corresponding changes in education plans.
• Utilizes appropriate tools and testing methodology for assessing changes in learners’ knowledge, skills, and clinical practice as well as for determining education project/program effectiveness.
• Develops knowledge and skill based measures to collect performance data and integrates measurement activities and findings into quality projects.
• Recommends and leads the implementation of educationally focused improvement efforts aimed at improving key clinical/operational processes and outcomes.
• Recommends various quality projects based on information revealed in planning, conducting, and evaluating staff education.
• Researches available funding sources and submits funding proposals in order to implement support and expand new or existing programs to meet the educational needs.

Required Qualifications

• BSN required
• Minimum requirement of three years of clinical practice in specialty area
• Knowledge and previous application of adult learning principles
• Demonstrated leadership skills evidenced by serving as a charge nurse, preceptor or episodic teacher
• Demonstrates complex decision-making skills and problem solving ability

Preferred Qualifications

• Master of Science in Nursing or related education field preferred
• Certification in specialty area preferred
• Previous experience in a role as an educator preferred
• Previous experience working within multidisciplinary teams or nursing leadership committees preferred

 Position Details

• Job Type/FTE: Full-time
• Shift: Day, 8a.m-5p.m
• Unit/Department: 9W
• CBA Code: Non-Union