The Competency With No Checkoff: What We Ask of Preceptors and Never Prepare Them For
Nursing validates every skill in the building except the one that shapes its next generation.
Chest tubes, blood administration, restraints, the IV pump you have used for six years and still check off on every spring. We have a form for all of it.
Then somebody asks you to precept, and there is no form.
The Ask
Scenario: The Ask
Somebody asks you in the hallway. Usually the unit educator, sometimes the manager, a few weeks before it starts.
You say yes. The nurse who trained you said yes. And saying no out loud is something you would have to explain, to a person who is already short.
Three weeks later there is someone beside you with badge access and none of your instincts. Your name is still on the assignment.
Nobody asked whether you know how to teach. Nobody asked what you plan to do the first time they make a real mistake in front of you, or the first time you have to tell them they are behind.
Whether the person beside you is a nursing student on a placement or a new graduate in their sixth week of orientation, the same thing holds. You were never checked off to do this.
Underneath all of it sit three questions. Have I been doing this long enough? How am I supposed to do my job and teach at the same time? What happens to me if they hurt somebody?
Who Is Eligible to Precept
Nursing talks about precepting as senior work. Something you grow into.
The regulations do not say that. NACNEP’s seventeenth report to Congress reviewed state board of nursing requirements for clinical preceptors and found the most agreed-upon eligibility criteria to be RN licensure, preparation at the baccalaureate level, and one to two years of experience (NACNEP, 2021).
L’Ecuyer and colleagues (2025) write that nurses are being recruited into the preceptor role earlier than ever before, and that these early career nurses may lack the experience and skill set of previous preceptors. Wolfe and Joswiak (2024) put it plainly: a lack of experienced preceptors may require people with limited or no precepting experience to fill the role. Both are practice publications rather than research.
Nobody has measured it, that I could find. There is no study reporting how many years of experience working preceptors actually have. NCSBN’s 2024 survey found the median RN had been licensed seventeen years, up from fifteen in 2022, with median age rising from forty-six to fifty (Smiley et al., 2025). The experienced workforce did not thin out.
The bar is still one to two years. Any of us can be asked.
Training, Not Years
Warren and colleagues (2023) ran a secondary analysis of the Association for Nursing Professional Development’s 2020 national preceptor practice study, putting three things up against how preceptors valued the role: formal education, years of experience, and preceptor training.
Training won. Preceptor training predicted how much nurses valued precepting and its seven component parts better than their degrees or their years did.
It measured how preceptors held the role, not how their orientees turned out.
But it answers the question you asked yourself in the hallway. Your years are not the thing carrying this work. Your preparation is.
Your years are not the thing carrying this work. Your preparation is.
The Preceptor Class
You probably took one. Somewhere there is a certificate, or a completion date in the learning system. Some of those classes are genuinely good. Some are a module you click through between shifts. What they share is that they happen once, and nobody has watched you precept since.
Liu and colleagues (2025) reviewed twenty-seven studies of interventions built to strengthen preceptor competencies and rated each against the Kirkpatrick model. Every one of them measured what preceptors learned. Six went as far as measuring whether behavior changed on the unit. One looked at whether anything changed after that.
Nursing has been running preceptor workshops for decades and has almost never checked whether they change what happens to anybody. What the review could say about design is worth taking: the programs that covered core content, ran face to face, and spaced their sessions closer together looked more promising than the rest.
The class is not nothing. Warren’s data says it does more for you than your years do. The educational module or class constitutes the entirety of the system. While IV pump competency is validated on an annual basis, actual preceptor practice is rarely directly observed, leaving the quality of clinical teaching largely unexamined.
Who Is Standing Next to You
Emotional intelligence carries a competency inside relationship management called Developing Others: reading where another person actually is, then deliberately building what is missing (Goleman et al., 2002). Developing Others is the skill being asked of you, and it starts with reading where this nurse actually is.
What you are reading is a nervous system in transition. Duchscher (2009) described the first stage of a new graduate’s adaptation as a physical, intellectual, emotional, developmental and sociocultural upheaval, experienced from the inside as anxiety, insecurity, inadequacy and instability. Confidence is not the thing that went missing. Upheaval is the ordinary shape of the first year.
Confidence is not the thing that went missing. Upheaval is the ordinary shape of the first year.
Transition shock also predicts what comes next. Lay and Masingboon (2025) pooled twelve studies of 8,593 new nurses across eight countries and found a moderate association between transition shock and intent to leave. Intent to leave ran from 6 percent to 61 percent across those studies.
SAMHSA (2014) names safety and trustworthiness among the six principles of a trauma-informed approach. For a new nurse they are not abstractions. Safety is knowing what happens to them when they tell you they are behind. Trustworthiness is finding out on day thirty that what you told them on day one is still true.
Two Jobs at Once
Precepting runs two jobs at the same time. Varghese and colleagues (2023) interviewed thirteen preceptors, every one of whom had completed preceptorship training, and found exhaustion coming from exactly that, training new staff while carrying a regular patient assignment. One described the demands as overwhelming without support. Another finished their documentation after the shift ended.
A prepared preceptor is running something they already know. Language for feedback. A sequence for the first week. A plan for the day a med error lands. An unprepared preceptor builds all of that in real time, on top of a full assignment, at hour nine. The teaching is the piece that thins out first, because the patient care is the piece that gets charted.
Three Practices for Preceptors
Say what you do not know yet, on the first day.
Name your own limits out loud before anything has gone wrong.
“I have been here fourteen months. There will be things I have to look up with you. I would rather do that in front of you than guess.”
Saying it hands a new nurse trustworthiness on day one, and models the behavior we grade learners on and rarely demonstrate ourselves, which is admitting uncertainty while there is still time to fix it.
At fourteen months this is most of your credibility. At fourteen years it still works, because a new nurse who watches you look something up learns that looking things up is what nurses do rather than what beginners do.
Narrate the reasoning, then hand it over.
They can see your hands. They cannot see your thinking, and your thinking took years to build.
“I am going to room 4 before room 2. Her pressure dropped an hour after labetalol and I want eyes on her before I chart anything.”
Narrating costs no extra time. The reasoning is already running.
Narrating alone will not build their clinical judgment. It shows them yours. The other half of this move is handing the thinking back, which sounds like asking before telling.
“Before I say anything, who are you seeing first and what is making you say that?”
Let them answer, including when the answer is wrong, then walk the difference between their reasoning and yours. Judgment gets built in that gap. A learner who only ever watches you decide learns what you decided.
Newer preceptors have an advantage here they lose later. Your reasoning is still visible to you, which makes you better at describing it than a nurse who automated it twenty years ago.
Coach as you go, not at the end of the shift.
Say it while they can still remember the moment.
“Two things from the last hour. You checked the armband before you drew anything up, which is exactly what I want to see. The piece I want to change is when you called the provider, and here is what I was watching for.”
By the end of a twelve-hour shift, the specific moment is lost to memory. When feedback is delayed, they receive an evaluation of their character rather than actionable guidance. Specific behaviors can be coached and refined, whereas a broad summary of identity cannot.
Why This Matters
The First Year
A new nurse learns the job from whoever is standing next to them, and they copy you, including the parts you did not mean to teach. Transition shock is already eroding their commitment to stay, and you are the key presence navigating it alongside them.
The Preceptor
Smith and colleagues (2024) surveyed 210 preceptors and found 28 percent met criteria for burnout while 96.7 percent said they enjoyed the role. Both can be true at once. The people carrying this work want to be carrying it and are being worn down doing it, which is not something you fix by finding more volunteers.
Professional Standards
NLN Competency 2 asks educators to facilitate learner development and socialization, including encouraging self-reflection and personal goal setting (NLN, 2025). The competency does not check whether the person doing the socializing has the word educator in their title. On most units it happens between a nurse with a full assignment and a nurse in their eleventh week, and that is where the profession is actually formed.
3 Key Takeaways for Nurse Educators
Conclusion
We check off the pump every spring. The chest tube, the blood, the restraints, the things that would hurt somebody if we got them wrong.
Then, we pair one nurse with another and expect them to shape a professional throughout orientation, guided only by the unpredictable demands of that shift’s patient assignment.
The nurse who was asked to precept is not underqualified for it. They were handed a competency nobody prepared them to carry, the same way their orientee was handed a word nobody defined. One gap at two levels, passed down because everybody assumes it was handled behind them.
Somebody has to stop assuming. It might as well be the nurse who said yes in the hallway.
References
Duchscher, J. E. B. (2009). Transition shock: The initial stage of role adaptation for newly graduated registered nurses. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 65(5), 1103–1113.
Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R., & McKee, A. (2002). Primal leadership: Realizing the power of emotional intelligence. Harvard Business School Press.
Lay, K. S. M., & Masingboon, K. (2025). Turnover prevalence and the relationship between transition shock and turnover intention among new nurses: A meta-analysis. International Journal of Nursing Studies Advances, 9, Article 100390.
L’Ecuyer, K., Von Der Lancken, S., & Keeler, H. (2025). Preceptors: Essential to nurse retention. American Nurse Journal, 20(7).
Liu, K., Wang, S., Liu, M., Tang, S., & Chen, Q. (2025). Interventions to enhance the core competencies of clinical nursing preceptors: A systematic review. Nurse Education Today, 146, Article 106536.
National Advisory Council on Nurse Education and Practice (NACNEP). (2021). Preparing nurse faculty, and addressing the shortage of nurse faculty and clinical preceptors: Seventeenth report to the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Congress. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Health Resources and Services Administration.
National League for Nursing (NLN). (2025). Core competencies for nurse educators.
Smiley, R. A., Kaminski-Ozturk, N., Reid, M., Burwell, P., Oliveira, C. M., Shobo, Y., Allgeyer, R. L., Zhong, E., O’Hara, C., Volk, A., & Martin, B. (2025). The 2024 national nursing workforce survey. Journal of Nursing Regulation, 16(1, Suppl.), S1–S82.
Smith, M., Rogers, A., Fultz, J., Davies, C., & Monroe, M. (2024). Nurse preceptor burnout: Contributing factors. JONA: The Journal of Nursing Administration, 54(4), 235–239.
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). (2014). SAMHSA’s concept of trauma and guidance for a trauma-informed approach (HHS Publication No. SMA 14-4884). Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
Varghese, B., Al-Balawi, R. M. O. A. M., Joseph, C. M., Al-Akkam, A. A. A., Alomari, A. M. A., & Swallmeh, E. (2023). The lived experiences of nurse preceptors in training new nurses in Qatar: Qualitative study. BMC Nursing, 22(1), Article 456.
Warren, J. I., Harper, M. G., MacDonald, R., Ulrich, B., & Whiteside, D. (2023). The impact of preceptor education, experience, and preparation on the role. Journal for Nurses in Professional Development, 39(4), 191–200.
Wolfe, S. M., & Joswiak, M. E. (2024). Novice preceptors facilitating nursing student clinicals: A roadmap for success. Journal for Nurses in Professional Development, 40(2), 118–122.