When people talk about the coming surge in aging Americans, they usually talk about buildings. More communities. More beds. More services. The conversation is almost always about capacity, and capacity matters. But buildings do not staff themselves, and the workforce conversation has been narrowed to a single role.
We talk about caregivers, and we should. But we rarely talk about the chefs, dining teams, accountants, HR professionals, activities directors and frontline leaders who make a community function.
That is the gap I want to name. Senior living does not only have a caregiving crisis. It has a much broader workforce crisis, and the industry is still preparing for only part of it.
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Beyond the Caregiving Crisis
Ziegler, a specialty investment bank and advisory firm serving the senior living and healthcare sectors, reports an average annual workforce turnover rate of 35.4 percent. Dining staff turnover sits at 40 percent, while registered nurse turnover is at 40.8 percent.
Those numbers tell a story most industry conversations miss. The roles people leave fastest are not only the clinical ones. They are the hospitality roles, the entry-level roles, and the roles that too many organizations treat as replaceable rather than developmental.
I believe the industry cannot hire its way out of this. We have tried. Job postings, signing bonuses, recruitment events. Those tactics move individuals, not systems. What changes outcomes is whether people see a future here. Whether a dishwasher can see a path to line cook, a line cook to sous chef, a certified nursing assistant (CNA) to licensed practical nurse (LPN) to registered nurse (RN), or an administrative assistant to a role in payroll or HR with the right training and qualifications.
Without those pathways, every hire risks becoming a temporary solution. With them, the workforce becomes something organizations build rather than continually replace.
This is not only a workforce issue.
It is a quality-of-life issue for the people we serve. When turnover is high, residents feel it. They see unfamiliar faces. They lose the server who knew how they take their coffee, the activities director who remembered their granddaughter's name, the nurse who noticed a change before anyone else did. Longevity in staff is not a nice-to-have. It is part of what makes a community feel like a community.
The next generation of residents will not judge senior living solely by whether adequate care is available. They will expect dining, wellness, engagement, hospitality, and professional services that match the way they have lived before entering a community. We cannot promise that experience without building the professional workforce capable of delivering it.
Not Just Filling Vacancies
Ziegler found that 56.2 percent of operating budgets now go to employee compensation, and 80.5 percent of providers are investing in workplace culture. That is encouraging.
But investment without strategy tends to become spending. The organizations that will thrive are the ones that treat retention, succession planning, and professional development as core business strategy, not as HR functions to delegate and forget.
I believe the industry has an advantage it does not promote well enough. Senior living is one of the few sectors where a young person can enter without a degree and build a genuine career across multiple disciplines. Healthcare, hospitality, culinary, finance, operations, wellness, and leadership are all under one roof.
But a career path that no one can see is a career path that no one will choose. Students cannot consider a future they do not know exists. We need to be in culinary schools, hospitality programs, business schools, and community colleges, showing people what this work actually looks like and how far it can take them.
That also means investing in the people already here. Bureau of Labor Statistics projections show home health and personal care provider roles adding 847,300 jobs between 2025 and 2035, with roughly 760,500 openings each year. Those numbers illustrate the scale of the labor challenge in care alone. But they do not capture the culinary, hospitality, finance, operations, and leadership talent senior living will also need.
Some of the people who fill those roles will come from within our own organizations if we develop them. Others will come from outside if we can show them this is a place worth building a life.
Cost of Getting It Wrong
What happens if we do not do this? The industry constructs more buildings and hires more people who leave. Experienced staff retire, taking decades of knowledge with them. New hires arrive without mentors, and the quality of what we deliver slips in ways that numbers cannot easily capture. Older adults and their families feel the difference. The industry's reputation suffers. Recruitment gets harder. The cycle repeats.
What happens if we do this well? Senior living becomes a career destination rather than a stopgap job. Turnover falls. Residents see familiar faces and feel continuity. Experienced leaders mentor new ones. The industry builds its own talent pipeline instead of competing for the same shrinking pool.
Those outcomes are achievable, and they are not utopian. They are the natural result of treating people as the long-term investment they are.
Leaders in senior living, in education, and in workforce policy all have a role to play here. But the most important shift is internal. We have to stop treating workforce planning as filling vacancies and start treating it as building careers. We have to show young people that this industry offers a future, and we have to make that future real for the people already working here. If we cannot do that, we will build the buildings and fail the people they were meant for.
The age wave is coming. Whether it arrives with the workforce to support it is a decision we are making now.
Leigh Anna Compton, SPHR, SHRM-CP, is director of human resources at Still Hopes Episcopal Retirement Community and writes about workforce development in senior living.
All opinions are the author’s own.