Education benefits are a common workforce strategy intended to support professional growth, career advancement, and retention. But access to a benefit does not guarantee utilization. At Advocate Health, nurses and leaders frequently encountered challenges navigating education assistance programs, including confusion about eligibility, support, reimbursement requirements, and the connection between available funding and professional development goals. Despite substantial investment in educational resources, inconsistent understanding and application limited their impact for Advocate’s nursing staff.

This article describes how an intentional partnership between NPD practitioners and the workforce development team moved the needle from benefits that existed on paper to implementing steps to tangible actions so nurses could actually utilize their benefits. Relaunching the Education Assistance Program involved aligning communication, guidance, and operational support.

The Challenge: Ongoing Professional Development Access vs Utilization

Education benefits, such as tuition assistance, continuing education (CE) funding, and certification support, are popular recruitment or retention strategies in healthcare. At Advocate, nurses and leaders often found these programs confusing, inconsistently applied, or disconnected from clinical expectations and career progression. Questions about eligibility, licensure requirements, certification pathways, and reimbursement processes unintentionally became barriers rather than enablers.

As a newly merged organization, Advocate Health was simultaneously working to harmonize educational assistance benefits across several legacy health systems, each with varying policies, eligibility requirements, and processes. This transition created additional complexity for teammates, particularly nurses, who were often unsure of which benefits were available, who qualified, and how to access support. As demand for nursing education and career advancement opportunities increased, the organization faced the dual challenge of aligning benefit offerings while improving awareness, consistency, and ease of access for eligible teammates.

For NPD practitioners, who support role development and professional growth across the organization, this created a familiar tension. We are charged with championing ongoing professional development while also staying aligned with enterprise policy, regulatory requirements, and workforce strategy.

From the nurse's perspective, the value of an education benefit is not defined by policy language, but by the ease and efficiency with which it supports professional growth from onboarding to specialty practice, certification, and advanced education.

When guidance is unclear or processes vary by site, participation can drop even when funding is available. This created an opportunity to strengthen the connection between available resources and actual utilization.

What Changed From the Previous Way

One of our most significant shifts was moving away from legacy ad hoc reimbursement toward a standardized, transparent model grounded in IRS guidance and workforce best practices (Internal Revenue Service, n.d.).

Under our harmonized Education Assistance benefit, eligible nurses can access:

• Up to $5,250 annually in education assistance (Internal Revenue Service, n.d.)
• $1,500 for continuing education and certifications
• Enhanced funding of up to $7,500 for nursing degree programs
• Targeted student loan support for eligible clinical roles

Key features of the relaunched Education Assistance Program included:

• Certification direct pay program initiated to provide access to critical nursing certifications so nurses do not have to pay out-of-pocket and wait for reimbursement, removing a common financial barrier.
• Targeted programs for tuition, certifications, continuing education, clinical certification direct pay, and loan support.
• Explicit alignment between education activities and role‑based or career‑path relevance.
• Enterprise‑wide consistency in benefit eligibility and funding thresholds.

For nurses, this meant clearer expectations and fewer surprises. For NPD practitioners, it meant the ability to confidently coach nurses and leaders using shared language, shared resources, and shared accountability.

The Throughput: A Strategic Partnership Between NPD and Workforce Development

Education benefits sit at the intersection of clinical excellence and workforce strategy. We consolidated previously fragmented programs into a single enterprise approach that supports degree programs, continuing education, and certifications through a unified platform. This simplified eligibility, improved consistency, and expanded equitable access for nurses across roles and regions. When our harmonized Education Assistance Program relaunched, it was centrally owned by workforce development and enabled through a single enterprise platform. We gained a consistent, equitable framework across the organization. We quickly learned, however, that true impact requires more than policy design.

Within the partnership between NPD and workforce development, the NPD team served as the throughput, translating educational benefits into accessible pathways for nurse growth and advancement. The NPD team’s day-to-day work turned policy intent into something nurses and leaders could understand and use. NPD practitioners brought deep insight into nursing professional growth and specialty certifications, while workforce development connected education to career mobility, equity, and long-term talent sustainability.

When these functions operate independently, education benefits can become transactional. When we align, they become a strategic lever for both patient care and workforce resilience.

In close collaboration with workforce development leaders, we:

• Translate complex policy language into practice-relevant guidance for nurses and leaders.
• Clarify distinctions between license renewal fees and eligible continuing education, reducing misinformation and frustration.
• Align certification, CE, and academic pathways with role expectations, specialty practice, and career mobility.
• Coach leaders on how to support utilization, so funding does not become blanket reimbursement disconnected from practice needs.
• Advocate for nurses by elevating practice-based needs and partnering to adjust tools, FAQs, and messaging.

This partnership reframed education benefits from a transactional process into a strategic development tool.

The Role of NPD: From Informational Support to Practice Advocacy

Our inbox communications tell a consistent story: Nurses and leaders turn to NPD practitioners when education intersects with practice, certification, or role development.

In this model, we functioned as:

• Educators, reinforcing policy‑aligned decision‑making
• Advocates, helping nurses navigate appeals, documentation, and appropriate learning options
• Strategic partners, collaborating with workforce development to refine FAQs, tool kits, and communication strategies

This work aligns with core NPD standards and competencies related to education, consultation, change management, and advocacy, illustrating how our practice extends beyond the classroom into system-level impact (Harper, 2023).

In aligned models, education benefits are codesigned, jointly communicated, and continuously refined. Decisions about eligibility, certification support, and reimbursement are informed by clinical practice realities and workforce priorities alike. This shared stewardship enables education programs that are easier to navigate, more relevant to practice, and more impactful over time.

Outcomes: Supporting Nurses While Strengthening the Workforce

While workforce development retains ownership of policy and funding, our partnership helped ensure the benefits achieved their intended outcomes:

• Increased nurse confidence in using education benefits
• Reduced variability in certification and CE decision-making
• Stronger alignment between education investment and workforce priorities
• Improved leader trust in the NPD team as a strategic partner in talent development

Most importantly, there has been high utilization by Advocate’s nursing staff. The current utilization rate is 52.1% with more than $5 million in approved educational benefit dollars for the organization. Approximately 3,000 nurses are utilizing their tuition assistance benefits.

Aligned NPD–workforce development models help ensure that nurses, regardless of role, setting, or tenure, can access education in ways that genuinely support advancement and practice readiness.

As we reduced friction and clarified pathways, we saw stronger engagement in certification and continuing education, an outcome consistent with published evidence linking specialty certification and professional development to nurse and patient-care benefits (Fox et al., 2022; Ma et al., 2021; Smith et al., 2021).

We also aligned our approach to priorities that support nursing excellence, including Magnet® recognition—a designation from the American Nurses Credentialing Center that recognizes nursing quality and professional practice.

In our organization, nursing-specific programs represent a sizable share of current demand, about 18.3% of currently open Education Assistance applications 2026 YTD. That is a strong signal that nearly 1 in 5 teammates engaging with the benefit are doing so through nursing-focused pathways, reinforcing that the program is actively supporting a core clinical workforce segment—not just general education interest.

The volume of nursing-specific utilization underscores why NPD–workforce development alignment matters: At this scale, clarity and consistency in guidance can materially influence nurses’ ability to translate the benefit into career progression.

Implications for NPD Practice

Education benefits are not peripheral to nursing practice, they are a powerful lever for competence, engagement, and retention. When NPD practitioners intentionally partner with workforce development, education policy becomes actionable, equitable, and meaningful at the bedside.

For organizations navigating benefit harmonization or platform transitions, this work underscores a critical lesson: Policy sets the direction, but NPD practitioners ensure the impact. Education benefits represent one of the most underutilized levers in workforce strategy. By moving beyond ownership silos and embracing partnership between NPD and workforce development, health systems can reimagine education assistance as an integrated, nurse-centered experience that strengthens practice today while building the workforce of tomorrow.

References

Internal Revenue Service. (n.d.). Tax benefits for education: Information center.  https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/tax-benefits-for-education-information-center

Harper, M. G. (2023). Core curriculum for nursing professional development (6th ed.). Association for Nursing Professional Development.

Fox, N. M., Richter, S. M., & Russini Gerardo Floresca, L. (2022). Empowering nurses through peer-led instruction to increase specialty certification rates. Journal for Nurses in Professional Development, 39(5). https://doi.org/10.1097/NND.0000000000000814

Ma, H. L., Godwin, C., McNeely, H. L., & Ramirez, J. (2021). Board specialty certification: A role for the nurse educator. The Journal of Continuing Education in Nursing, 52(11). https://doi.org/10.3928/00220124-20211008-02

Liu, S. I., Shikar, M., Gante, E., Prufeta, P., Ho, K., Barie, P. S., Winchell, R. J., & Lee, J. I. (2022). Improving communication and response to clinical deterioration to increase patient safety in the intensive care unit. Critical Care Nurse, 42(5), 33–43. https://doi.org/10.4037/ccn2022295

Smith, J. M., Ma, H., & McNeely, H. (2021). Board specialty certification: A strategy for success. Nurse Manager. https://doi.org/10.1097/01.NUMA.0000752820.27561.54

American Association of Critical-Care Nurses. (n.d.). Specialty certification benefits patients, employers, and nurses.