Kahuna Ladder
Elevating Your Clinical Workforce
Efficiently develop, advance, and retain the best people. Bring all your data onto one cloud-based platform that eliminates paperwork and lifts the administrative burden. Now you can easily engage nurses and allied health professionals, report on progress, reward clinicians for their work, increase nurse resilience, and support your Magnet® and Pathway to Excellence® designations—all while reducing turnover risk.
Timesaving Clinical Ladder for Healthcare Career Development
Weary of paper-based processes? On a single platform, clinicians apply, submit required materials, receive feedback, and access resources. Managers streamline Ladder evaluations, view progress, and communicate transparently with health workers. Kahuna Ladder makes participation easy and helps grow your program.
Boost Retention and Morale
Reduce turnover and burnout with a structured growth pathway. New skills, a sense of purpose, pay-based incentives, and upward mobility boost satisfaction and engagement.
Get Rid of the Paper
Free managers to focus on what matters, not paperwork. A single online location with convenient dashboards, data visualization, and custom reporting saves time and effort.
Raise the Bar on Patient Care
Equip staff with the latest techniques using ongoing development. Fresh knowledge, competencies, and experiences often result in better patient care and improved outcomes.
Gain Development Transparency
Encourage clinical ladder participation with accessibility, transparency, and feedback. Clear, structured growth opportunities empower current staff and attract new talent.
Build Team Trust
Build trust by laying a foundation for open communication, support, and recognition. Meaningful conversations and rewards for hard work promote a sense of belonging.
Turnover Is Expensive—Clinical Ladders Help You Retain and Grow Your Nurses
A well-structured clinical ladder does more than recognize excellence—it drives retention. By offering clear advancement pathways, organizations can keep experienced nurses engaged and motivated. This is especially critical when the average cost of RN turnover exceeds $61,000 per nurse, making development-focused strategies a financial imperative.
“The average cost of turnover for a staff RN is $61,110 with the range averaging $49,500 to $72,700. This is an 8.6% annual increase.”
— 2025 NSI National Health Care Retention & RN Staffing Report*
Advance Clinical Careers With a Purpose-Built Digital Solution
Kahuna’s Clinical Ladder capabilities were developed hand-in-hand with our healthcare customers to reflect how organizations actually structure, manage, and scale clinical advancement. From customized progression rules to integrated scoring, feedback, and reporting, Kahuna Ladder transforms manual ladders into transparent, competency-based growth journeys that align with real operational needs, and support your nurses every step of the way.
Automated, Transparent Career Progression
Give your clinicians a clear path forward. Replace binders and manual tracking with a digital, easy-to-follow career ladder, helping your teams see where they stand and what they need to move forward.
Customizable Advancement Requirements
Give a clear blueprint for advancement. Customizable workflows and eligibility rules enable you to define exactly what is required to progress in each phase of the ladder program, ensuring a consistent and transparent advancement process.
Streamlined Review and Feedback
Keep employees, supervisors, and admins aligned every step of the way. Structured workflows manage reviewer assignments, feedback, and revision cycles to ensure that each application moves forward smoothly and efficiently.
Integrated Development and Compliance
Connect learning, development, and certifications directly to career progression. Integrations with your HRIS, LMS, and other core systems make it easy to tie growth efforts with real skills and stay ready for Magnet® and Pathway to Excellence® audits.
Guided Growth with Real-Time Scoring
Turn career advancement into a guided journey. Clinicians can build professional portfolios, document milestones, and navigate the ladder process individually with real-time scoring, activity-based feedback, and accessible how-to documentation.
Actionable Analytics and Reporting
Provide clear, actionable insights for career advancement. With built-in analytics dashboards, leaders can monitor program participation, advancement progress, and track skill trends to make more informed decisions and measure program impacts.
Level Up Clinical Ladder Administration
Ease the administrative burden with a streamlined software-as-a-service (SaaS) clinical ladder platform designed with input from multiple health systems. Kahuna’s team has decades of nursing experience and understands the need to focus on development instead of getting bogged down in administration.
Uphold Excellence Designations
Leverage Analytics and Reporting
Integrate With Existing Systems
Use automation to satisfy and track Magnet and Pathway to Excellence program requirements. Kahuna’s electronic clinical ladder gives you a professional development structure for measured goal achievement.
Tap into real-time analytics and reporting to improve decision-making and build bench strength. Customized dashboards help you track engagement, progress, and key metrics for audits and Magnet reporting.
Synchronize all data across your human resources information system (HRIS), learning management system (LMS), and professional development platforms. Native integration with Kahuna’s competency management system adds even more value.
Trade Paperwork and Emails for Digital Clinical Ladder Efficiency
Leave time-consuming, labor-intensive manual tracking behind! All the advantages of an effective clinical ladder program are yours with one flexible, customizable platform purpose-built for the healthcare industry.
Traditional Clinical Ladder
- Manually track progress and certifications across disparate files
- Restrict access to data based on its physical location
- Update records with manual paperwork, requiring multiple steps
- Limit data visibility for nurses, managers, and supervisors
- Waste valuable time compiling and analyzing data for actionable reports
- Reduce engagement with a lack of transparency and interactivity
- Rely on paper records to pull reports when needed for audits
Digitalized Clinical Ladder in Kahuna
- Automatically track progress and certifications in one single system
- Access data anytime, anywhere on a secure platform
- Update clinical ladder profiles as activities are completed in a few clicks
- Share data effortlessly between nurses, managers, and supervisors
- Generate comprehensive, custom, and actionable program reports
- Enhance program transparency, approachability, and engagement
- Pull real-time, accurate data for audits quickly and efficiently
Frequently Asked Questions About Clinical Ladders
A clinical ladder is a professional development model used to help guide nurses and allied health professionals in their career journeys while working in a clinical setting. A clinical ladder might also be referred to as a professional portfolio or professional development depending on your organization.
A clinical ladder has multiple levels, each with specific skill, experience, and educational requirements. Clinical ladders enhance engagement and provide transparent opportunities for advancement in nursing and allied health professions.
A clinical ladder for nursing supports various levels of nursing and allied health career development and advancement to offer an upward progression in terms of knowledge, capabilities, and experiences. These levels may range from novice to expert, but no standard levels exist. The names and qualifications for each successive level are determined by the organization.
A clinical ladder program for nurses is a structured system providing clear pathways for nursing professional development. The system includes multiple levels of achievement, each with specific criteria to be met for a nurse to advance to the next level. Advancement is based on a nurse’s skills, experiences, education, and contributions to patient care.
Kahuna Ladder is a good example of a digital clinical ladder purpose-built for nurses and allied health professionals. Healthcare systems gain the flexibility to customize their levels and track eligibility, participation, and progress to spot high-performing units, boost engagement, identify employees needing support, and more.
Health systems reap valuable benefits from clinical ladder programs:
- Transparent professional development and career advancement within a structured framework
- Engaged nursing staff, improved retention, and an increased ability to attract and acquire top talent
- One accessible location for tracking nurse competence and proficiency, achievements, and feedback for a single source of truth
- Ability to quickly identify competency gaps and conduct informed workforce planning
- Higher quality of care from a skilled and knowledgeable staff
- Avenue for professional recognition and appreciation for nurse contributions, expertise, and experiences that promotes a positive workplace atmosphere and greater job satisfaction
- Support for an organizational culture of excellence in the journey to achieving or maintaining Magnet status
- Opportunity to train nursing students using a clinical ladder so they can be recruited more easily with the incentive to start full time at a higher level
Additional advantages emerge when a nursing career ladder is digitalized for an electronic format. Healthcare organizations can improve efficiency by tracking development progress automatically, enhance how data is managed and used, and better allocate resources based on training and development. Digitalization also helps health systems increase nurse engagement and job satisfaction more effectively. Empowered nurses tend to remain with the health system, providing high-quality, evidence-based patient care that meets industry, regulatory, and patient health requirements.
Digitalizing a nursing clinical ladder is best done by implementing a software solution that puts all data into an electronic format. This eliminates all the disparate emails, spreadsheets, PDFs, and additional paperwork accumulated in files and binders for tracking nurse accomplishments and clinical ladder progression.
Technology such as Kahuna Ladder, Kahuna’s digital clinical ladder software platform, enables you to bring all your data together electronically and create structured, accessible, and efficient processes for professional development in a single location. Kahuna understands healthcare and provides a streamlined platform purpose-built for healthcare to empower your nurses, managers, and entire health system.
Digitalizing a clinical ladder increases the ease of use, accessibility, transparency, and visibility of a clinical ladder program across the health system so nurses can engage and advance more easily. With online access, nurses can stay organized with all documents centralized in one place, monitor their progress, see feedback easily, and receive automated reminders to stay on track. Hard work is rewarded through promotions, compensation increases, or added responsibilities and tracked within the system, giving nurses a record of their accomplishments and rewards.
Open and enhanced communication with managers is an additional advantage for nurse participants. With digitalization, managers can streamline their evaluation processes, deliver timely feedback, increase their involvement in developing staff, and gain better visibility into progress.
Related Resources
WebinarSee Kahuna Ladder in Action
Blog Climbing the Digital Clinical Ladder
Blog7 Problems a Digital Clinical Ladder Solves
Press ReleaseKahuna Ladder for Healthcare
Engage, Develop, Retain
*NSI Nursing Solutions, Inc., 2025 NSI National Health Care Retention & RN Staffing Report, March 2025.
[https://www.nsinursingsolutions.com/documents/library/nsi_national_health_care_retention_report.pdf]