By Robyn Stone
Providers must invest in the career advancement of team members, writes Robyn Stone. Otherwise, their missions may soon be at risk.
The LeadingAge LTSS Center @UMass Boston is excited to begin work on a new project designed to offer certified nursing assistants (CNA) a solid pathway to career advancement. Over the next few years, we’ll work with the Moving Forward Nursing Home Quality Coalition to support 19 Geriatric Workforce Enhancement Programs (GWEP) as they collaborate with nursing home providers around the nation to establish registered apprenticeship programs (RAP) for CNAs.
This project could represent a significant step forward in LeadingAge’s ongoing efforts to strengthen the long-term services and supports (LTSS) workforce by promoting employee advancement through career ladders and lattices. I’m particularly excited that our work with GWEPs in multiple states could help us scale and spread the RAP model in U.S. nursing homes.
We believe initiatives like this will help us raise recruitment and retention rates by ensuring that all professional caregivers, including CNAs, have the support they need to pursue meaningful, long-term careers in our sector.
There’s only one catch. Career advancement initiatives are not free. They require an investment of time and money from a variety of sources, including providers of aging services.
Fortunately, that investment will pay long-term dividends by helping the LTSS sector build a stronger, more sustainable workforce that will be ready to help us fulfill our missions for many years to come. Without that workforce investment, however, I fear our shared mission will be at risk.
To preserve that mission, I’m asking providers to launch career advancement initiatives in their organizations and take ownership of those efforts. I recommend these steps:
Make an organizational commitment to career advancement. Career advancement is not a program; it’s a philosophy and a commitment that high-performing, high-quality employers make to their organizations and employees. Fulfilling that commitment involves thinking broadly about the jobs our sector needs, discerning how your organization can help create those jobs, and training team members to fill those jobs.
Design a program to help you fulfill that commitment. You know best what your organization needs. That’s why you must shape your organization’s career advancement program and make it your own. You can tap outside partners to help you implement the program. But its design—and its size and scope—have got to come from you.
Involve others in the design work. Invite CNAs and other employees to join the process of designing your career advancement initiative. Ask employees to describe the roles they’d like to play in your organization. This vital information will help you develop jobs that people want to fill. It will also help you ensure the jobs you create will actually be available to the team members who want them. This co-designing process is essential; it will help ensure that your program will work.
Make a financial commitment. This commitment is essential; no program will work without it. Agree to increase an employee’s pay as they advance through the career advancement program. Your program won’t succeed without this financial commitment. No employee, even the most loyal, would willingly take on additional training, new responsibilities, and a new job without additional compensation. Would you?
The workforce crisis promises to become more challenging in the coming years as we experience a growing shortage of prospective employees, including frontline caregivers, nurses, and administrators. More than ever, our success in filling these positions depends on our ability to promote our organizations as places for current and prospective employees to build meaningful careers that will help them grow as individuals and professionals.
I urge you to establish career advancement initiatives to meet this challenge. Older adults and their families will thank you for it. Your team members will thank you, too.
Robyn I. Stone, DrPH, is senior vice president of research at LeadingAge, and co-director of the LeadingAge LTSS Center @UMass Boston. Her widely published work addresses long-term care policy and quality, chronic care for people with disabilities, the aging services workforce, affordable senior housing, and family caregiving.