Nursing Instructor

A Nursing Instructor is part Professor, part Nurse, hired to teach and train nursing students as well as other medical personnel, showing them how to be Nurses. While most Nurses have innate qualities that make them good at what they do – they’re born, for instance, with kindness, sensitivity, empathy, and compassion – personality, unfortunately, isn’t enough. To be a good Nurse, one also needs specific skills culled from training and education – which a Nursing Instructor provides.

As a Nursing Instructor, you’re employed by colleges, hospitals, and private teaching clinics. You accomplish your work through a combination of classroom instruction and hands-on coaching in hospitals, clinics, and laboratories.

Like any Professor, your job includes choosing curriculums, planning lessons, giving lectures, assigning homework, advising students, and giving and grading exams. What makes you special, therefore, isn’t what you do, per se. Instead, it’s what you teach, which includes academic subjects such as anatomy, physiology, chemistry, nutrition, and psychology, as well as vocational training, the purpose of which is to teach students practical skills they can use on the job, like how to read vital signs, draw blood, dress wounds, administer medications, and, of course, interact with patients.

Indeed, nursing is as much about bedside manner as it is medicine, so you should be prepared to teach not only science but also communication and customer service.

More than a Teacher, you’re a Farmer: You spend your days cultivating tomorrow’s crop of Nurses so that there are enough of them to take care of the world’s burgeoning population – which keeps on growing, and keeps on getting sick!