As turnover costs rise, burnout persists, and compliance requirements grow more complex, health systems need a more efficient way to address the challenges of managing and retaining clinicians. A digital clinical ladder offers a structured, online framework for career development that empowers nurses and allied health professionals to grow their skills and capabilities while advancing through clearly defined levels. Program participants earn recognition for clinical expertise, education, leadership, and contributions to patient outcomes.
Below are seven critical challenges that weigh heavily on many healthcare organizations today, and how a digital clinical ladder program can help you solve them. Throughout, you’ll see key statistics that highlight why now is the time to go digital.
Table of Contents
1. Low Engagement and Retention
Burnout and staffing shortages have become far too common among nurses and allied health professionals. 65% of nurses report high levels of stress and burnout (Beyond the Bedside: The State of Nursing in 2025 survey (FAU), while the national RN turnover rate stands at 16.4% (NSI 2025).
Heavy workloads and stress can lead to exhaustion and turnover, especially when the path ahead looks like more of the same. Often, organizations engage nurses with career development as part of an annual routine to improve job satisfaction; however, participation with these programs often wanes halfway through the year. These programs often falter because of:
- Lack of awareness that a program or plan exists
- Unclear requirements or benefits of participation, leading to confusion
- Time wasted hunting down missing documents
- Insufficient clarity resulting in ongoing back-and-forth communications
- Difficulty accessing supervisors for meaningful feedback
With a digital clinical ladder in nursing, you can engage, retain, and upskill your best people by offering clear growth paths and recognizing each nurse’s achievements. Depending on how the ladder program is structured, nurses can take direct ownership of their careers and receive professional recognition, compensation increases, additional responsibilities, and promotions.
This ongoing support drives a significant boost in job satisfaction, motivation, and morale—an impact that ultimately translates directly to your bottom line. With the average cost of turnover for a bedside RN at $61,110 (an 8.6% increase over last year), hospitals are losing $3.9–$5.7 million annually, and every 1% change in RN turnover equates to about $289,000 in cost or savings (NSI 2025).
Success Signals
- Increased program awareness and participation
- Higher employee engagement
- Improved employee retention
- Increase in caregiver satisfaction, competencies, and promotions

2. Administrative Burden Involved in Professional Development
Professional development is essential for clinicians, but manual tracking—whether through binders and spreadsheets or traditional systems like an HRIS or LMS—can be cumbersome. HRIS platforms excel at storing HR data, and LMS platforms at delivering learning content, yet neither was built to manage continuous credentialing, competency validation, and career-ladder workflows. Keeping accurate, up-to-date records demands extensive time and effort, pulling nurses away from patient care and other essential activities.
Without centralized reporting and analytics, it’s difficult to view aggregated numbers on ladder program applicants, the status of submissions, and retention trends related to clinical ladder involvement. Leaders often rely on gut instincts and unreliable information. While development programs do generate valuable data, paper-based programs offer no efficient way to leverage this information for strategic decision-making.
McKinsey found that automating routine documentation and improving task delegation could free up to 15% of nurses’ time, which is time that could be reinvested in patient care, mentoring, and continuous learning.
A digital clinical ladder makes it easy for organizations to track development plans, competencies, certifications, and achievements in one platform, significantly reducing the administrative burden and its associated costs. All data and information are available in a single online location accessible by nurses, supervisors, and the clinical ladder review board. Nurses are free from manual paperwork, so they can focus on their development, and it’s easier to recognize their accomplishments in real time. Best-in-class solutions also integrate with your existing HRIS, HCM, LMS, and other platforms, breaking down the data silos and multiplying the value of each data point.

Success Signals
- Increased clinical ladder efficiency
- Improved data accuracy
- Reduced administrative time
- Reduced operational costs
- Improved collaboration between operations and HR
3. Lack of Clarity in Career Development and Progression
The absence of clear, accessible paths for career advancement can lead to frustration and stagnation. In one study on factors influencing nurse retention and turnover decisions, 20% of participants cited a lack of professional growth as a primary reason for considering leaving, and one nurse shared:
“I left because I was appointed to a permanent higher position… I left a frontline clinical role as it didn’t offer much in the way of career progression or the freedom to use skills beyond the role of a scrub/scout.”
(Participant 91)
Nurses need structured growth opportunities that help them meet the criteria for career progression, but typical paper-based or manual clinical ladder programs can be cumbersome and time-consuming, only adding to the frustration and enhancing the lack of visibility.
A digital clinical ladder platform standardizes and streamlines professional development and career advancement, making it easy to:
- Track competencies, achievements, and progress toward development goals
- Access personalized growth plans and learning resources at any time
- Build a long-term professional portfolio record that highlights all achievements
For executives and managers, a digital clinical ladder platform facilitates data-driven workforce development, providing comprehensive reporting and analytics with customizable dashboards to track program engagement, as well as key metrics for regulatory compliance, Magnet® reporting, and strategic workforce management and succession planning.
Success Signals
- Reduced operational time and cost
- Increased program awareness
- Reduced operational planning time
- Improved clinical outcomes

4. Difficulties With Transparency and Communication
Even with formal mentorship programs, clinicians often face unclear advancement criteria and communication gaps with their supervisors. If individuals are unaware of a career path or how their performance is evaluated, they may feel confused and dissatisfied.
Healthcare systems with a manual, paper-based clinical ladder—or organizations without a clinical ladder at all—are prone to struggle with transparency and communication. They might use intranet portals to share information about career progression criteria and employee achievements. Some may encourage open-door policies where employees can discuss their development with supervisors. While valid, these methods are often inefficient and can be far more effective when paired with a digital clinical ladder program.
A digital clinical ladder makes transparency and communication effortless by:
- Serving as a single source of truth for criteria, scoring, feedback, and next steps for clinicians, supervisors, and the clinical ladder review board
- Enhancing visibility so clinicians can view their advancement path in real time
- Eliminating confusion and driving engagement with built-in notifications and comment threads that replace disparate email threads
- Standardizing the ladder steps and review process with a clear framework to foster a culture of trust

Success Signals
- Higher employee engagement
- Increased program participation
- Time savings for supervisors
5. Career Pathing Bottlenecks
Many health systems still outline career advancement strategies with paper forms, binders, and annual performance reviews, and regular staff meetings take place to communicate goals, career opportunities, and performance expectations. While these methods serve a purpose, they often leave both clinicians and program administrators in the dark about requirements, progress, and who is stalled at each level. Without analytics and reporting, it’s difficult to pinpoint where nurses plateau in their development and why.
A recent study, “Developing a Prediction Model of Career Plateau for Nurses,” found that 34% of nurses reached a career plateau and that organizational support (or lack of) is one of the strongest predictors of whether clinicians get stuck or continue moving forward.
A digital clinical ladder helps alleviate this bottleneck and provides support to clinicians moving through the program by:
- Making requirements transparent by showing clinicians exactly what’s needed at each step
- Visualizing progress with real-time dashboards that pinpoint where individuals or cohorts have stalled
- Highlighting gaps such as missing assignments or delayed competency reviews
- Providing targeted support with reminders and direct links to learning resources
- Streamlining communication between clinicians, mentors, and administrators on- platform
- Standardizing the ladder program throughout the organization, ensuring all clinicians benefit from clear and consistent criteria
By shining a light on where progress stalls and offering the right support at the right time, a digital clinical ladder keeps clinicians moving forward, fosters continuous growth, ensures your workforce always has the support it needs to advance, and reduces the operational time and effort required to run the program.
Success Signals
- Reduced operational time and cost
- Increased program awareness and participation
- Improved collaboration across departments

6. Performance Management and Talent Identification Concerns
Nurses and allied health professionals need clear ways to build and showcase competence, and executives need real-time visibility into workforce readiness to allocate talent where it matters most. A digital clinical ladder delivers both by linking professional development to validated skills and competency data instead of tenure or subjective performance reviews.
Executives can leverage this data to recognize top performers, monitor training progress and performance metrics, and identify areas for improvement. By tailoring training programs to address specific skill needs and career pathways, leaders gain the ability to efficiently optimize talent development.
As clinicians demonstrate competence and move up the career ladder, health systems foster a culture of continuous improvement, while recognizing achievements and rewarding performance. By matching each nurse’s validated skills to the right use case, leaders can more effectively optimize staffing, improve nurse mobility, and improve efficiency across the system.

Success Signals
- Easier identification of skills gaps
- Increased competency completion
- Improved performance metrics
- Greater workforce readiness
7. Regulatory and Compliance Management Issues
Healthcare systems must comply with numerous regulatory standards and requirements, which can be complex and time-consuming, particularly when individual nurse certifications must be tracked and updated. Furthermore, achieving and maintaining Magnet and Pathway to Excellence® designations requires a commitment to nursing excellence and professional development that can be challenging to document and manage. Tracking every nurse’s certifications, continuing education hours, and ladder participation manually can be both overwhelming and error-prone. Fewer than 10% of U.S. hospitals have earned Magnet® status (ANCC).
Fortunately, clinical ladder programs typically align with industry standards and requirements such as those set by the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC), The Joint Commission (TJC), and the Magnet Recognition Program®. A digital clinical ladder streamlines the documentation and tracking of compliance-related activities and credentials, enabling organizations to easily generate relevant, time-saving reports and make audit preparation a breeze.
Success Signals
- Less time needed to prepare for accreditation processes
- Faster report generation
- Reduced survey and audit preparation time

Available Soon: Kahuna Ladder for Healthcare
Built with input from multiple health systems and supported by a team with decades of nursing experience, Kahuna Ladder for Healthcare is a digital clinical ladder platform for nursing and allied health.
Kahuna Ladder replaces traditional time-consuming, paper-based, and manual clinical ladders with an intuitive software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that dramatically reduces your administrative burden, fosters continuous learning and development, empowers nurses to uplevel their careers, and measurably improves engagement and retention.
Kahuna’s new clinical ladder platform effectively solves the seven problems outlined in this blog, and more! A highly intuitive user interface, flexible and transparent scoring, and multiple security levels for assessments are added benefits.
Kahuna Ladder will be officially available on July 1, 2025. For more information or to arrange a demo, reach out to Kahuna’s clinical ladder experts today.