During nursing education students obtain knowledge and skills to develop their professional competence. Teachers may elect to provide pedagogical tools preparing students for current and future healthcare needs. The purpose of this theoretical article was to highlight Work-Integrated Learning combined with the Portfolio Method as a pedagogical strategy and tool for nursing students to develop professional competence for lifelong learning. This strategy contains six phases: pre-reflection, reflection-in-action, reflection-on-action, self-evaluation, meta-reflection and knowledge-in-action, which can help nursing students, during their clinical education, develop deeper understanding of their future profession, while also providing a teaching planning tool.