Developing nurse managerial competencies and Nursing Administration syllabuses led to reflections on the relationship between a political and pedagogical project for a graduate course and the profile of those who graduate from it, as proposed in the National Curricular Guidelines, and the nurse work market in Curitiba, in the Brazilian state of Paraná. The purpose of the descriptive-exploratory and qualitative survey was to identify convergences and divergences between the expectations identified in the political-pedagogical project and those of the managers who hire nurses. The Brazilian education and health policies were singled-out as determinant factors for qualification and teaching in Administration in the nursing area. The hermeneutic-dialectic analysis of the managerial competencies that are expected in the teaching and work market ambits was guided by the determinant axis, i.e., that of the structural dimension which covers these policies; of the particular dimension, represented by the local work market and by the teaching institution; and of the singular dimension, pertinent to the ambit of teaching Administration in Nursing. The results show the need for teaching to close the gap with the work market with regard to boosting the nurses' managerial competency beyond the technical dimension to include the communicational, ethical, political, and citizenship development realms.
nursing; education; work market; administration in nursing; professional competency