Masters Program - Clinical Nurse Leader

So, just to clarify, upon graduating from this program you will be both an RN and a CNL? In either case, I think you should address both the patient care and leadership/management.

Truth?? Entry level MSN will not provide you with any sort of advanced qualification for an entry level nursing job, so that CNL will be pretty worthless. You'll be competing with all the other new grads for exactly the same positions. In nursing, you can't "lead" until you have at least achieved basic professional competence - it would be ludicrous to assume responsibility for things you have never done, let alone evaluating & supporting the competency of subordinates... and that is the (professional and legal) accountability of nurse leaders.

No matter what your entry-level degree is, you'll still have to undergo a period in which you transition from student to practicing nurse. Nurse Residency programs are considered to be the best route for this to happen. You may want to get some input from healthcare organizations - how do they feel about hiring entry-level MSNs? How many have they actually hired? Hiring managers in my organization tend to actively avoid them due to previous issues - usually described as not "fitting in" with the rest of their new grad cohort. We also have objective data (based on a standardized clinical assessment process) that e-l MSNs are not as well prepared as their BSN or ABSN colleagues.

It would be a shame to invest in a more expensive option only to discover that it is a disadvantage when it comes time to look for that all important first job.

Wait.... you're going to enter a clinical nurse leadership MN program and you aren't even a nurse yet? No matter what they call it, somebody who has never worked a day as a licensed graduate nurse will never be hired as a nurse manager/leader. For what it's worth some of us are old enough to remember when they told us BSN students we could expect to be managers at graduation. Although some of us rolled our eyes at that and never agreed with it for a minute, there were some of our classmates who were crushed when they realized how ludicrous the rest of the world knew that was.

It might be better to position yourself as a new grad who recognizes she needs practical nursing experience but whose long-term goal of working in a leadership position led her to take this CNL course of study to have in her back pocket, so to speak, to inform your ongoing learning as a staff nurse. This knowledge will always be there, enriched by a few years of actual practice, making her ready to advance when possible or appropriate.

Thanks for the various responses. I'll be taking your responses into consideration.

You make a good point but in short I highly doubt a respectable school such as USF and various other schools would offer a MSN program for none nursing BSNs if they knew students wouldn't get hired. That would be a serious damage to their credibility.

You make a good point but in short I highly doubt a respectable school such as USF and various other schools would offer a MSN program for none nursing BSNs if they knew students wouldn't get hired. That would be a serious damage to their credibility.

Trust me. Nobody is going to hire you for a leadership position without nursing experience, except perhaps as an ADON at a nursing home, where RNs are typically thrust into leadership positions over the LPNs and CNAs all the time.