Innovations in Clinical Ladder Programs: Trends and Strategies
Innovations in Clinical Ladder Programs: Trends and Strategies
September, 2026
Now in the initiative’s third year, the American Organization for Nursing Leadership (AONL) is leading a national effort to better understand and respond to the key workforce challenges facing nurse leaders. The central aim of this work is to highlight these challenges while also identifying practical strategies to strengthen and support nurse leaders in addressing them.
As part of this effort, AONL has partnered with Laudio, a purpose-built software and analytics company whose mission is to inspire and amplify the people who deliver great healthcare. Frontline leaders and executives use Laudio to streamline work for leaders and help drive large-scale change through everyday human actions.
AONL and Laudio Insights, Laudio’s dedicated analytics group, have partnered on bi-annual reports, published each spring and fall, highlighting data and best practices to inform decision-making for frontline leaders and their executives. The prior report, Engaging and Retaining Gen Z: Trends and Strategies (AONL, Spring 2026), shared actionable data on the new norms and expectations of Gen Z nurses as well as how nurse executives and managers are innovating to support them.
This Fall 2026 report, Innovations in Clinical Ladder Programs: Trends and Strategies, offers new insights into how clinical ladder programs (CLPs) can be modernized to strengthen engagement, retention and career growth across the nursing workforce, grounded in a national data set of more than 41,500 RNs and 70,500 clinical ladder applications. These data-backed insights are coupled with strategies shared by nurse executives and nurse professional development experts who have redesigned their programs to better reflect the needs and expectations of today’s nurses. The findings are intended to promote constructive conversations about how nurse leaders can best support nurses at every stage of their careers while building CLPs that are financially sustainable and aligned with organizational strategy.
The evolving and increasingly complex roles of nurse leaders are essential to delivering effective and sustainable care. Our aim is to provide a data-driven foundation to support the continued evolution of healthcare, with a particular focus on strengthening its frontline leaders.
