Assisted Living Director Directions

October 20, 2010 10:57 AM

Help my SO achieve his dream of working in an assisted living facility! (Seriously.)

Here's the deal: My SO wants to get into assisted living facility management (executive or assistant director-level) as a career. He's an attorney who's already passed his state and national nursing home administrator's licensing exams, and is currently volunteering in an area adult day-care facility.

With the tremendous growth you hear about in this industry, it would seem that potential employers would be beating down his/our door. But this is not the case.

So I'm posting this question just to see if there's something -- a secret handshake, an industry password we're not aware of -- that could help break the log-jam. He's in touch with the (mostly two) recruiters who seem to handle the majority of jobs he's interested in. He's networking. He's not exclusively applying for the top-top jobs that he's probably not yet qualified for.

What else could/should he do? Thanks for any inside insight you can provide.

posted by Work to Live to Work & Money (4 answers total)

Yes, assisted living is a growth industry, which leads me to believe that there is going to be a demand for more such facilities, hence, it may be feasible for your well qualified SO to open his own assisted living facility, rather than finding an existing facility that would want to hire him. Since that will require capitalization of some kind, the two most obvious options would be to either solicit investors, and/or to find people who are willing to make a payment in advance, for assisted living that they will want in the future. Also bear in mind that with even limited capitalization you can start a small facility, which can grow in the future.
posted by grizzled at 11:41 AM on October 20, 2010

what population is he looking to work with?

He may have too much experience for many Program Directors to want to hire as an entry level employee. I.e. it looks like, on paper, that he is looking for a temporary job until he finds something else.

FWIW, yeah, it is growth industry but funding stream are going to be tight for a few years.
posted by edgeways at 12:03 PM on October 20, 2010

Edgeways suspects he's applying to jobs he's overqualified for. I made the opposite guess that he was going for director/deputy director-type positions for which he was underqualified for lack of experience in the sector.

If you're in Chicago, I'm guessing that the opportunities for which your SO is best qualified are not exclusively handled by two recruiters. I'd suggest that he talk about his resume with insiders to get a firmer grasp of the positions he should be targeting, and then he should beat a path to the employers' doors and skip the recruiters.
posted by FLAG (BASTARD WATER.) (Acorus Adulterinus.) at 12:15 PM on October 20, 2010

We work with ALF's regularly, both private and state run. In my experience, here, none of these places will hire as an administrator/manager someone who has not "done his time in the trenches."

That may be because we have a glut of college brats with masters degrees and no applicable experience, but what appears to be a closed loop is actually a loop of people wary of folks trying to skip the gore and go straight for the glory, as it were.
posted by TomMelee at 5:26 AM on October 21, 2010