LEAD 6163 Module 1 Workforce Analysis Example

Twenty-Eight Lines, Five Empty, Nine Near Retirement: A Faculty Workforce Analysis for a Composite Texas Panhandle Nursing Department

Student Name

American College of Education

LEAD6163: Management of Human Capital

Module 1 Assignment

Instructor Name

October 12, 2026

Introduction

I chair the nursing department of a composite regional public university in the Texas Panhandle. The department offers a prelicensure BSN, an RN-to-BSN completion program and a small family nurse practitioner track, and it is the main source of new nurses for hospitals across a large rural region. Each year we turn away qualified applicants, and the reason given is always the same: not enough faculty. This paper analyzes the department's faculty as human capital, measuring current supply, demand, the gap between them and the risks that the next five years hold.

Human Capital as the Frame

Human capital refers to the knowledge, skills and abilities that people bring to an organization. Crook et al. (2011), meta-analyzing 66 studies, found that human capital relates strongly to organizational performance, especially when that human capital is not readily tradable in labor markets, that is, when it is specific to the organization and hard to buy from outside. Their conclusion was that managers should invest in building and retaining such firm-specific capital. The frame fits a nursing department well: a faculty member who knows our clinical partners, our curriculum and our students is far harder to replace than her credentials alone suggest.

Current Supply

The department has 28 budgeted full-time faculty positions. Five are vacant, a vacancy rate of 17.9%, and two of those have been open for more than a year. Of the 23 filled positions, 9 faculty members are 60 or older, 8 are between 45 and 59 and 6 are under 45. Six hold doctorates, all of them over 55, which matters because accreditation and graduate teaching depend on doctorally prepared faculty. The department also relies on 31 part-time clinical adjuncts, most of them staff nurses at partner hospitals, who supervise about 60% of clinical hours. Full-time turnover averaged 11% a year over the last three years, with exits split between retirement and moves to better-paid clinical roles. Among the 23 full-time faculty, 4 teach in the nurse practitioner track, and only 2 of them hold the national certification that track requires of its clinical faculty, which makes those two positions single points of failure.

The Adjunct Workforce

The 31 clinical adjuncts deserve separate attention because they carry so much of the teaching. Most work twelve-hour shifts at partner hospitals and teach one clinical group a week on their days off. They are paid by the clinical day, receive a two-hour orientation and have no voice in curriculum. Their turnover is far higher than full-time faculty's: 13 of the 31 were new this year. Each new adjunct needs a full faculty member's time to orient and observe, which means adjunct turnover quietly consumes the scarcest resource in the department. Adjuncts are also exposed to a risk outside the department's control. When the regional hospital faced a staffing crisis two winters ago, it restricted its nurses' outside work, and the department lost seven adjuncts in a month. A workforce plan that treats adjuncts as interchangeable spare capacity overlooks both their real value and their fragility.

Demand

Demand has two sources. The first is enrollment. Last year the prelicensure program received 320 qualified applications for 120 seats, and our partner hospitals report that they could hire every graduate several times over. Expanding to 160 seats, which the university's strategic plan proposes, would require about six additional full-time faculty under the department's current ratios. The second source is replacement: faculty who retire or leave must be replaced simply to hold enrollment steady.

Projecting Retirements

Fang and Kesten (2017), projecting retirements of nursing faculty nationally for 2016 to 2025, estimated that retirements over the decade would equal one third of the 2015 faculty, drawn mostly from faculty aged 60 and older, and warned that the loss would fall hardest on doctoral preparation, senior rank and the ability to teach at the graduate level. Our department's profile is more concentrated than the national one. If the nine faculty aged 60 and older retire within five years, as their own stated plans suggest, the department would lose 39% of its current full-time faculty and four of its six doctorally prepared members. Replacing headcount is hard; replacing the doctoral preparation and clinical relationships held by those nine people is far harder.

The Gap

Putting supply and demand together gives a five-year gap. Holding enrollment steady requires filling the 5 current vacancies and replacing roughly 9 retirements and 10 other departures at the current turnover rate, about 24 hires. Growing to 160 seats adds about 6 more, for a total near 30 hires over five years, in a department that has filled an average of three positions a year recently. The gap is not only numerical. The department must also replace doctoral preparation, since accreditation standards expect a substantial share of doctorally prepared faculty, and the firm-specific knowledge of how our clinical placements and partnerships actually work.

Why People Leave

Turnover research helps explain the departures that are not retirements. Hom et al. (2017), whose review spans a hundred years of studies on why employees quit, traced how explanations moved from job satisfaction and the availability of alternatives toward broader models, including the attachments that embed people in their jobs and communities and the shocks that prompt departure. Our exit interviews fit that picture. Faculty who left for clinical roles cited salary, an average gap of about $18,000 between an assistant professor's pay and a master's-prepared nurse's at the regional hospital, but several also described weak connections to colleagues and to the community. Faculty who stayed often had local family and long-standing clinical relationships.

Risks Ranked

Ranked by consequence, the department's human capital risks are, first, losing doctoral preparation, which threatens accreditation and the nurse practitioner track; second, losing the clinical partnership knowledge held by senior faculty, which threatens placements; third, adjunct dependence, since adjuncts are employed by hospitals that can withdraw them during staffing shortages; and fourth, recruitment capacity, since the department has never filled more than four positions in a year.

Limits of the Analysis

The projections rest on faculty members' own stated retirement plans, which can change with health, family or markets, and on a three-year turnover average that may not hold. The salary comparison uses one hospital's posted range rather than a regional survey. And headcount ratios understate the work of the nurse practitioner track, whose clinical supervision is unusually intensive. The figures are good enough to show the scale of the problem, which is the purpose of a first workforce analysis, but the human capital plan will need them refined each year.

Conclusion

The department's workforce is smaller than its budget, older than the national profile and more dependent on a few doctorally prepared senior faculty and on hospital-employed adjuncts than is safe. The gap over five years is roughly 30 hires and, more importantly, the transfer of knowledge that cannot be hired. The rest of this course will address recruitment and selection, development and mentoring, retention and a human capital plan that treats firm-specific knowledge as the asset it is.

References

Crook, T. R., Todd, S. Y., Combs, J. G., Woehr, D. J., & Ketchen, D. J., Jr. (2011). Does human capital matter? A meta-analysis of the relationship between human capital and firm performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96(3), 443-456. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022147

Fang, D., & Kesten, K. (2017). Retirements and succession of nursing faculty in 2016-2025. Nursing Outlook, 65(5), 633-642. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.outlook.2017.03.003

Hom, P. W., Lee, T. W., Shaw, J. D., & Hausknecht, J. P. (2017). One hundred years of employee turnover theory and research. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(3), 530-545. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000103