Feature: How RPL Helped a Nurse Manager Earn Her Graduate Degree in 14 Months
March 15, 2025 · RPL Office
Eighteen Years of Experience
By the time Fatima Al-Rashid sat down with an MUC admissions advisor in January 2023, she had spent eighteen years as a registered nurse and nursing unit manager at two New Brunswick hospitals. She had supervised teams of thirty. She had designed shift rostering systems. She had led a cross-departmental quality improvement initiative that reduced medication errors by 22% across three wards.
She did not have a graduate degree. And she needed one — the director role she wanted required it.
"The idea of sitting in two years of coursework covering things I have been doing for nearly two decades felt genuinely demoralizing," she says. "But I also knew I needed the credential."
The RPL Assessment
MUC's RPL Coordinator worked with Fatima to map her professional experience against the learning outcomes of the Master of Healthcare Management programme. The process involved a portfolio submission — detailed documentation of professional projects, performance records, certifications, and a reflective essay — followed by an interview with a faculty panel.
The assessment found that Fatima's experience aligned substantially with seven of the programme's twelve core course outcomes. She was granted credit equivalency for those seven, meaning she entered the Master's programme needing to complete only five core courses and her research thesis.
Fourteen Months to Graduation
Fatima graduated from the Master of Healthcare Management programme in March 2024 — fourteen months after beginning her studies, compared to the standard twenty-four. Her thesis examined staffing model resilience in rural New Brunswick hospitals during surge conditions.
"The RPL process was rigorous," she says. "It was not a shortcut. They made me demonstrate and articulate things I had done instinctively for years. That process was actually valuable in itself — it forced me to see my own expertise more clearly."
She is now Director of Nursing Operations at a Fredericton-area health facility.
"For anyone with significant professional experience who is hesitant about going back to school — please talk to the RPL office before you assume what the path looks like. It may be shorter than you think."