How Our WGU Preceptor Placement Works

WGU requires you to secure your own preceptor and a minimum of two clinical sites, then submit them to your Placement Coordinator for review and approval. The Placement Coordinator, part of the Clinical Learning and Placement Support (CLPS) team, reviews and approves the preceptor and site and helps establish the Affiliation Agreement, but does not source or assign the preceptor. That sourcing burden falls entirely on the student.

This is where most students stall. You are cold-contacting practices, confirming credentials against WGU's eligibility rules, and hoping a site's legal team will sign a contract that can take up to six months to negotiate. We take that whole workstream off your plate for the MSN FNP and PMHNP tracks, the post-master's APRN certificates, and the RN-to-BSN community field experience.

We identify a preceptor who already meets WGU's eligibility rules before we ever send the name to your Placement Coordinator, so nothing bounces back at approval. Every WGU preceptor must hold an active unencumbered license, national certification in the specialty, and at least two years of current specialty experience.

For FNP, that means a board-certified NP (family, adult, peds, neonatal, women's health, or geriatric), an MD or DO board-certified in Family or Internal Medicine, or a CNM at MSN or higher. For PMHNP, that means a board-certified psychiatrist, PMHNP, or a qualifying licensed behavioral-health provider within WGU's limits. We verify the license, the certification, and the experience against these rules so the preceptor you submit is one WGU can actually approve.

We secure a minimum of two clinical sites because WGU requires it, and we confirm each site will accept a WGU student and sign the paperwork. A preceptor without a willing site is not a placement, so we work both sides at once: the clinician who will teach you and the organization whose legal team must sign.

We also account for WGU's telehealth caps when we structure the sites. FNP students may complete up to 10 percent of hours (65 hours) via telehealth; PMHNP students may complete up to 75 percent of hours via telehealth. The remainder must be in person, so the sites we secure have to support the in-person balance your track requires.

Compliance runs through DISA Healthcare Technology (formerly American DataBank) on the Complio platform, which handles your background check and immunizations. We help you get through it cleanly so a missing document does not delay your start.

Individual sites frequently layer their own onboarding on top of this. Depending on the site, you may also need to clear ACEMAPP, CastleBranch, or a similar platform. We flag those site-specific requirements early so you are not scrambling to satisfy two systems at once during your Clinical Internship term.

The Affiliation Agreement is a legal contract between WGU and your clinical site, and it can take up to six months to negotiate. That timeline is the single biggest reason NP students miss their intended start term. This is why WGU tells students to engage the Placement Coordinator about one year before Clinical Internship I.

We shepherd this contract by getting the right documents to the right people, tracking redlines between the site's legal team and WGU, and keeping the negotiation moving so it lands before your term begins. We do the legwork; the Placement Coordinator still helps establish the agreement on WGU's side.

Your hours are logged inside WGU's own Field Experience Page and Activity Log in the Student Portal; there is no outside system for this. Our job ends where WGU's system begins: we make sure the preceptor and both sites are confirmed and the Affiliation Agreement is in place so that when you open the Field Experience Page, everything you need to log against is already approved.

FNP and PMHNP students log 650 direct patient care clinical hours across three Clinical Internship courses (Kansas residents seeking Kansas licensure who started on or after March 1, 2025 log 750). Getting to that first logged hour on schedule is the outcome we are hired to deliver.

Independent NP preceptor placement runs roughly 1,500 to 2,500 dollars per rotation, with psychiatric placements at the higher end. You pay only once the preceptor and site are confirmed. Our fee covers sourcing, verification, and the affiliation-agreement legwork; it is never a payment to the preceptor.

Preceptors are unpaid volunteers, and nothing we charge is passed to them. For scope, we serve the MSN FNP and PMHNP tracks, the post-master's APRN certificates, and the RN-to-BSN community field experience; we do not serve prelicensure BSN placements because WGU secures those itself.