From Transition to Leadership: Rethinking APP Workforce Development
By Jim Creason, President & CEO, ThriveAP
Advanced Practice Providers (APPs) have become indispensable to healthcare delivery, but the way organizations develop this workforce hasn’t always kept pace with how quickly the role has evolved.
Nurse practitioners and physician associates are practicing across an expanding range of specialties and care settings, helping organizations meet growing patient demand, improve access to care and build more flexible clinical teams.
As the role of the APP has evolved, however, another question deserves greater attention:
Has the way we develop the APP workforce evolved with it?
Many healthcare organizations have made meaningful investments in APP onboarding, transition-to-practice, specialty education and professional development. But these efforts can still exist as individual programs rather than components of a broader workforce strategy.
The opportunity is not simply to create more programs.
It is to connect them.
Healthcare organizations have an opportunity to think more comprehensively about how APPs are developed throughout their careers, and to make that development a more intentional part of workforce strategy.
APP Development Is a Continuum
An APP’s development needs don’t end when onboarding is complete.
A clinician entering practice may need structured support to translate academic preparation into the realities of clinical care. An experienced APP moving into cardiology, oncology, critical care or another specialty faces a different learning curve. Later, that same clinician may need opportunities to deepen expertise, assume greater responsibility, mentor others or step into leadership.
These needs are different, but they are not disconnected.
Together, they represent a continuum: Transition into practice. Specialty development. Continued professional growth. Leadership.
When those stages are viewed separately, organizations risk creating fragmented experiences for clinicians and duplicative approaches across departments.
When they are viewed as part of a broader workforce-development strategy, a different possibility emerges: a more intentional pathway for developing APP talent over time.
Scale Changes the Challenge
Developing one clinician well is important.
Developing hundreds or thousands of clinicians across specialties, departments and locations is a different challenge entirely.
As healthcare organizations grow their APP workforces, consistency becomes increasingly important. Leaders need to consider how to create a strong developmental foundation while recognizing that an APP in primary care has different needs from one entering oncology or critical care.
They also should preserve specialty-specific expertise without requiring every department to build its own development infrastructure from the ground up.
At scale, organizations need a way to identify where clinicians are in their development, understand where gaps exist and create pathways that can adapt as roles and workforce needs change.
These are not simply educational questions.
They are workforce-strategy questions.
The Goal Isn’t Standardization for Its Own Sake
Comprehensive workforce development does not mean every APP follows the same path.
In fact, the increasing diversity of APP roles makes that unrealistic.
What can be consistent is the intentionality behind the development.
Organizations can establish a common framework for how clinicians are supported while allowing the learning itself to reflect specialty, experience level, role and organizational need.
That might mean structured transition-to-practice for early-career clinicians. Specialty education for APPs entering new areas of practice. Continued development for experienced clinicians. Leadership pathways for those ready to take on broader responsibilities.
The individual pathways may differ.
The strategy connecting them should not.
We’ve Seen this Evolution Firsthand
ThriveAP’s own growth has reinforced this perspective for me.
When I joined the organization in 2022, ThriveAP was best known for a flagship transition-to-practice program. Since then, our work has expanded to nearly 30 programs spanning specialties and career stages, approximately 120 employer relationships nationwide and more than 1,000 APP participants annually.
But the most important part of that story isn’t the number of programs we’ve added.
It’s what that growth has taught us about the broader challenge.
As we’ve worked alongside healthcare organizations, we’ve seen the need for APP development extend across a much broader professional journey. Transition-to-practice remains important, but it is one component of a larger challenge: helping organizations develop clinicians as their roles, specialties and responsibilities evolve.
That experience has led us to a larger question:
What would comprehensive APP workforce development look like if we designed it intentionally and at scale?
The Next Evolution of APP Workforce Strategy
I don’t believe there is a single blueprint that every healthcare organization should follow.
Workforce needs differ. Clinical environments differ. APP populations differ.
But I do believe organizations will increasingly ask a common set of questions:
Where are the critical development points across an APP’s career?
Which capabilities should be developed consistently across the organization, and which require specialty-specific approaches?
Where are clinicians experiencing gaps as they transition between roles or levels of responsibility?
How can education, clinical leadership and workforce strategy become more connected?
And how do we build an approach that can grow as the APP workforce grows?
Those questions move APP development from a collection of educational activities toward something more strategic.
They also reflect an important shift in how we think about workforce investment.
The objective isn’t simply to help clinicians complete a program.
It is to create the conditions for APPs to continue developing, contribute meaningfully within their teams and build careers within the organizations that depend on them.
Building the Workforce Healthcare will Increasingly Depend On
The importance of APPs to healthcare delivery will continue to grow. That makes developing this workforce not only an educational priority, but an organizational one.
Healthcare leaders have an opportunity now to consider whether their approach to APP development reflects the increasingly sophisticated role these clinicians play within their organizations.
Do the pieces connect?
Can the model scale?
Does development continue as clinicians’ roles evolve?
And is APP development treated as an isolated educational function—or as part of the organization’s broader workforce strategy?
At ThriveAP, these are questions we’re continuing to explore alongside the healthcare organizations and clinicians we serve.
Because the next chapter of APP workforce development isn’t simply about doing more.
It’s about building a more connected, intentional and scalable approach to developing the workforce healthcare will increasingly depend on.
Jim Creason is President and CEO of ThriveAP, a national provider of workforce-development and educational programs for Advanced Practice Providers and the healthcare organizations that employ them. Since joining ThriveAP in 2022, he has led the organization’s expansion from a flagship transition-to-practice offering into a broader APP workforce-development platform. In 2026, Creason was named a Nashville Titan 100 honoree, recognizing his leadership and impact in the Nashville business community.
