When someone asks what I do for work, I sometimes struggle with the answer.
I’m a nurse, but I also work in an industry where my day does not look like what most people imagine when they hear that word. I develop and review nursing content, design curricula and assessments, evaluate clinical accuracy, and help translate complex nursing knowledge into educational experiences. I don’t spend my workday at the bedside, yet I use my nursing expertise every day.
Calling myself a “content nurse” helps, but even that title doesn’t fully capture the work. To someone outside the role, content development may sound like writing and editing. Those are certainly parts of the job, but they’re not what makes a nurse valuable in this space.
The nursing happens beneath the surface.
When nursing doesn’t look like nursing
Consider something as seemingly simple as reviewing a nursing assessment question. I’m not only checking grammar or determining whether the answer is factually accurate. I’m also asking whether the clinical situation is realistic. Does the nurse have enough information to make this decision? Is the action within the nurse’s scope of practice? Does the question reflect how nurses actually prioritize care? Could an incorrect option reinforce unsafe reasoning? Does the item assess clinical judgment, or does it simply reward memorization?
The finished product may be an assessment question. The expertise behind it includes clinical judgment, patient safety, evidence appraisal, nursing practice, and an understanding of how nurses think.
This experience isn’t unique to content development. Nurses work in technology, publishing, informatics, consulting, insurance, policy, digital health, product development, and other settings where their nursing expertise may be embedded within work that doesn’t immediately appear to be nursing.
Perhaps the problem isn’t that these nurses have moved away from nursing. Perhaps our picture of what nursing looks like hasn’t expanded as quickly as the places nurses now work.
The skills travel with us
Nurses develop a remarkable collection of transferable skills. We learn to recognize risk, establish priorities, communicate complex information, evaluate evidence, educate others, anticipate consequences, advocate for patients, collaborate across disciplines, and make decisions when the answer isn’t immediately obvious.
Those abilities don’t disappear when we remove our scrubs. They simply show up differently.
Clinical reasoning can become product consultation. Patient education can become instructional design or health communication. Evidence-based practice can become content development and evidence translation. Quality improvement can become process design. Knowledge of clinical workflow can inform technology development. Years spent noticing what can go wrong in patient care can become an invaluable perspective when reviewing a new product, process, algorithm, or educational resource.
Perhaps these roles also require us to expand what we mean when we talk about interprofessional collaboration. Nurses traditionally learn to collaborate with physicians, pharmacists, therapists, social workers, and other healthcare professionals. In unconventional roles, that circle can become considerably wider. Nurses may work alongside instructional designers, editors, psychometricians, software developers, engineers, product managers, data specialists, and other professionals who approach healthcare problems through entirely different disciplinary lenses.
In these environments, collaboration requires more than contributing clinical knowledge. Nurses must translate that knowledge so colleagues outside healthcare understand why a clinical distinction matters and how a seemingly small decision could influence nursing education, practice, or patient safety. The exchange works in both directions. Nurses also gain exposure to different approaches to design, communication, technology, analysis, and problem-solving. Collaboration becomes not only about healthcare professionals approaching the same patient but also about people from different disciplines combining expertise to influence healthcare in ways none could accomplish alone.
The output changes. The nursing lens remains.
Professional identity in nursing extends beyond a job title or a list of clinical tasks. For nurses working in unconventional roles, however, that identity may be harder for others to see. Colleagues may recognize the work without recognizing the nursing expertise behind it.
That invisibility can affect how we describe ourselves, too. When the familiar markers of nursing disappear from our workday, it becomes easy to describe what we produce rather than the expertise we use to produce it.
Change how we describe the work
When a nurse begins working in technology, publishing, education, consulting, or another industry, we frequently say that the person “left nursing” or “left the bedside.” The second statement may be technically accurate. The first may not be.
I didn’t stop using nursing when I entered content development. I took nursing with me.
We also can become more deliberate about explaining the value we bring to unconventional roles. “I write nursing content” describes what I produce. “I use nursing expertise to ensure educational content reflects safe, evidence-based, clinically authentic nursing practice” describes what I contribute.
That difference matters. It matters for nurses considering careers they may not realize are available to them. It matters for employers who may underestimate what a nurse can contribute to an interdisciplinary team. And it matters for a profession whose influence extends much further than the settings traditionally associated with nursing.
Nursing will always need nurses who provide direct patient care. Recognizing unconventional nursing roles doesn’t diminish that work. Instead, it acknowledges that the knowledge developed through nursing education and practice can influence healthcare in many ways.
Some nurses will influence one patient at a time. Others will influence the educational resources used by thousands of nursing students, the technology used by clinicians, the policies governing care, or the products that shape how healthcare is delivered.
Their work may not always look like nursing. We should become better at recognizing when it is.
Unconventional nurses haven’t necessarily left the profession. Sometimes, they’ve simply taken nursing somewhere new.
Kristen Ponichtera is a curriculum manager at LearningMate in Raleigh, North Carolina.
References
Godfrey N, Poague C, Phillips C. From direct care to leader: What happens to one’s professional identity in nursing? Nurse Leader. 2023;21(2):146-50. doi:10.1016/j.mnl.2022.12.008
Landis T, Barbosa-Leiker C, Clark C, Godfrey N. Professional Identity in Nursing Scale 2.0: A national study of nurses’ professional identity and psychometric properties. J Prof Nurs. 2024;50:61-5. doi:10.1016/j.profnurs.2023.11.004
Moscou-Jackson G, Homme M, Day J. Non-direct care nurses: Professional identity and role in the COVID-19 pandemic. J Nurs Adm. 2022;52(4):211-6. doi:10.1097/NNA.0000000000001133
