[Evaluation of nursing teachers' competencies to develop educational programs for adults]

To evaluate the performance that nursing teachers assigned to themselves in the skills to develop educational programs for adults, was the aim of this descriptive, comparative, cross-sectional study, performed with 226 teachers of undergraduate nursing courses from Sao Paulo. Data were collected by Likert scale, introduced in Excel® spreadsheet and analyzed using descriptive statistics and nonparametric tests of Wilcoxon and Friedman. The population was predominantly between 46-55 years (87/38, 49%) were women (198/87, 61%) and have a master degree (180/79, 65%). The teachers were far from reaching the competences which they sought. The lower skill was in building the design of programs to meet the learning situations and, the bigger, in evaluating educational programs. The greatest desire was to design programs with creative formats, and the smaller, was to use councils, committees and task force. It was concluded that designing educational programs for adults is still something unexplored and little experienced by these teachers.