Assistant Dean for Clinical Partnerships & Workforce Development
About the role
The Assistant Dean for Clinical Partnerships provides strategic leadership, oversight, and advancement of clinical education partnerships across the Creighton University College of Nursing (CON). This senior leadership position is responsible for developing, maintaining, and expanding relationships with healthcare systems, community agencies, clinical facilities, educational institutions, and workforce partners to ensure high-quality clinical learning experiences for undergraduate and graduate nursing students. The Assistant Dean serves as the College's primary liaison to clinical partners and is the central point of contact for interpreting, communicating, and operationalizing individual healthcare system requirements related to student and faculty clinical placement. This role ensures the College maintains a comprehensive understanding of partner-specific onboarding, compliance, credentialing, and access standards while collaborating closely with the CEOA Hub to facilitate the timely execution of all clinical entrance requirements. The Assistant Dean works proactively to resolve barriers, promote consistency across clinical sites, and ensure compliance with institutional, regulatory, and partner expectations. The Assistant Dean provides leadership for clinical education and partnership activities across all undergraduate and graduate nursing programs. This position supervises a team of clinical placement specialists responsible for coordinating student placements, maintaining clinical capacity, and supporting partner relationships. The Assistant Dean ensures clinical placement forecasts, enrollment projections, and workforce demand analyses are proactively communicated to internal and external stakeholders to optimize clinical capacity, support program growth, and align educational resources with healthcare workforce needs. The Assistant Dean leverages data and predictive analytics to guide clinical placement strategy, identify capacity constraints, and inform decisions that support sustainable enrollment growth across all nursing programs. In collaboration with academic leadership and operational teams, the Assistant Dean ensures College policies, clinical education processes, onboarding requirements, and student procedures remain current, compliant, consistently implemented, and effectively communicated across all programs. The Assistant Dean is also responsible for cultivating and strengthening strategic partnerships that enhance the College's impact on regional workforce development. In collaboration with the Dean and CON leadership, this position develops innovative workforce pipeline initiatives that increase the recruitment and retention of Creighton graduates within the Nebraska and Arizona healthcare markets, with particular emphasis on addressing local and rural workforce shortages. The Assistant Dean partners with healthcare organizations to expand internship, externship, residency, transition-to-practice, and employment opportunities that enhance student competitiveness, improve workforce readiness, and strengthen sustainable workforce pipelines for partner organizations. In addition, the Assistant Dean provides strategic oversight of clinical partnership operations, including the development and maintenance of affiliation agreements, preceptor engagement, workforce development initiatives, and continuous improvement of