This paper presents a nursing professional strategic plan grounded in Boyer's Model of Scholarship, outlining goals across 2-year, 5-year, and 10-year time horizons. The plan addresses all four scholarship types — Discovery, Integration, Application, and Teaching — explaining how each will guide professional development, research engagement, interdisciplinary collaboration, clinical practice, and knowledge dissemination. The paper argues that strategic planning at the individual level provides direction and motivation, and that linking professional goals to Boyer's framework ensures a coherent, evidence-informed approach to advancing both personal expertise and broader patient and community outcomes.
Strategic planning is valuable not only for organizations but also for individuals themselves. On a professional level, strategic planning paves the way for an individual to set goals that should be accomplished within a certain time frame. In this way, a person stays focused and motivated to fulfill the tasks that support progress toward yearly or monthly goals. This paper presents a professional strategic plan that provides direction — crucial for clarity in professional life — based on Boyer's Model of Scholarship.
The following table organizes professional goals across 2-year, 5-year, and 10-year time horizons for each of Boyer's four scholarship types.
Scholarship of Discovery
2-Year Plan: Building new knowledge by researching existing evidence.
5-Year Plan: Building and disseminating newly gained knowledge to peers and patients.
10-Year Plan: Consistently forming a link between new research — which will continue to emerge — and professional practice to sustain ongoing professional advancement.
Scholarship of Integration
2-Year Plan: Making connections between knowledge gained and other nursing disciplines for better patient outcomes. The disciplines include cardiac care, maternal and child care, elderly care, geriatrics, forensic nursing, mental health, emergency nursing, midwifery, obstetrics, and others (Tulchinsky & Varavikova, 2014).
5-Year Plan: Becoming part of interdisciplinary healthcare inquiry in which previously gained research knowledge can be applied.
10-Year Plan: Increased involvement in interdisciplinary programs and health policy review so that integrative nursing can help build person-centered relationships and trust with patients and society as a whole.
Scholarship of Application
2-Year Plan: Applying existing knowledge to the area of practice with dedication and the goal of serving the larger community and humanity.
5-Year Plan: Practicing knowledge development so that service to the profession is justified by current knowledge and experience in the practice area.
10-Year Plan: Remaining alert to updates and new information, using innovative methods to tackle real-life problems so that generated inquiry supports practical application in the practice area.
Scholarship of Teaching
2-Year Plan: Regardless of formal leadership status, transmitting knowledge through formal or informal means to anyone encountered — interdisciplinary colleagues, peers, patients, juniors, and others.
5-Year Plan: Contributing to improving expertise among faculty members and teaching them about skill development or evaluation methods.
10-Year Plan: After gaining extensive knowledge in the field, combining mentoring with education to facilitate learning for others and to support healthy community development.
Holistically, the scholarship of discovery will enable continued research so that an upgrade of new knowledge strengthens the skills and information required to treat patients effectively. History provides evidence-based practices and wider opportunities for their application, allowing service providers to learn from the benefits they generated and from any mistakes worth examining (Sheard, 2018). Research serves as a bridge between what is known and unknown, identifying gaps where skills and information may be lacking. Such gaps can be detrimental to patient care, making it necessary to engage in research for gaining the scholarship of discovery across the next 2, 5, and 10 years. Unresearched gaps would be detected when research into required skills, treatments, interventions, patient groups, and their social and cultural backgrounds and perspectives is explored thoroughly (Thelwall & Mas-Bleda, 2020). Attending conferences and workshops would also contribute to research and discovery.
"Sharing knowledge across disciplines and stakeholders"
"Applying knowledge ethically in clinical practice"
"Disseminating knowledge to peers, students, and patients"
Tulchinsky, T. H., & Varavikova, E. A. (2014). Human resources for health. The New Public Health, 729–770. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-415766-8.00014-8
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