“As value-based care comes to home care, “satisfactory” performance will no longer cut it. To improve care outcomes, agencies must develop care professionals who offer exceptional care and who serve as ambassadors of your organization. This requires the confidence from high-quality training and a well-planned career ladder.”
Last year, HCP surveyed over 80,000 employees and asked them to rate their agency across seven categories. “Training Received” scored second lowest on the list. This should raise a red flag for every home care administrator. The post-acute care industry ranks among the top five industries with the highest workforce shortages, which makes improving your training the long-term solution to an industry-wide staffing deficit.
Home care agencies help manage their communities’ health with an emphasis on improving outcomes for clients with chronic conditions. These clients might otherwise be the most frequent hospital users and incur the largest share of healthcare costs. As value-based care comes to home care, “satisfactory” performance will no longer cut it. Agencies must develop care professionals who offer exceptional care and who serve as ambassadors of the organization, which requires the confidence that comes from high-quality training and a well-planned career ladder.
What constitutes a career ladder?
A career “ladder” implies that there are defined “rungs” or steps that must be climbed to become an expert in a given role. As employees ascend a learning ladder and gain knowledge, experience, and confidence, they move through the five levels of competence:
- Novice
- Advanced Beginner
- Competent
- Proficient
- Expert
Making decisions that impact your client population relies on understanding and engaging your workforce at their current levels and planning for their continual achievement. A career ladder helps your organization understand where each employee stands and how best to utilize each person’s knowledge and strengths.
A career ladder equals training, recognition, and increased wages as a circular process. Here’s how to create one:
- Perform a skills assessment to determine your employees’ learning needs.
- Choose courses that fill your staff’s learning gaps across various topics.
- Increase training engagement by allowing your staff to complete specialized courses related to their own interests.
- Reward and recognize employees as they reach each rung of the ladder.
- Repeat the four-step process at 60 days, six months, and then annually.
What are the benefits of a career ladder?
Showcasing your career growth opportunities is the key to solving the industry-wide employee shortage and critical to improving your agency’s quality of (and capacity to deliver) care. Implementing a career ladder for your staff means:
- Easier recruitment and retention of new staff
- Increased teambuilding success and bonding opportunities when you include mentoring or having a “class” of learners at each ladder level who interact with each other
- Increased employee satisfaction/retention
- Improved organizational culture—one that prioritizes communication, teamwork, respect, and self-confidence
- Improved quality of care and quality of life for your clients stemming from increased clinical skills
The bottom line is better outcomes for clients.
What should a career ladder include?
Every agency should individualize its career ladder based on their client population. However, certain topics are recommended for any learning ladder, including:
- Soft skills training to promote empathy, better customer service, and person-centered care
- Clinical/job function training to enhance job performance, increase confidence, and improve client outcomes
- Distinct career tracks to attract candidates with different career goals, such as separate pathways for:
- Advanced care professionals (for people who want to remain in the caregiver role)
- Becoming a mentor/team lead
- Moving toward a nursing career
- A career in home care administration
Each track should have an inspiring mission and its own learning ladder defined by specific training requirements, financial rewards, and public recognition.
- Personal and sustained relationships between administrative and field staff are critical to the success of a learning ladder. You can’t just assign courses, forget about it, and expect a magically motivated workforce. It requires buy-in and support from the top down.
- Recognition of all your employees have accomplished, such as a graduation ceremony (with invitations to family members) or special pins or badges that serve as a designation of their achievement.
The best career path offers more than just rungs on a ladder
Many care professionals are eager to advance their careers but may not see a way forward.
Being a caregiver has historically been viewed as a dead-end job; the key is to provide a clear path to career success. Paint a picture that shows the real dead-end jobs are options that might pay a bit more in the short term—restaurant work, delivery services, retail—but do not enrich the employee’s skills or empower them to advance in the field.
Those other jobs ride the waves of the economy and other world events. We saw that during the height of the pandemic, with restaurants and stores closed for months or even years. In contrast, healthcare workers are always in demand. And, because the U.S. population is aging, the opportunities for a satisfying career in post-acute care will only continue to grow.
As you develop your organization’s career ladder, focus on career counseling. For many care professionals, the career counseling provided by your organization may be the first career advice they have ever received.
Career ladders are for office staff too!
It’s equally important for your office staff and supervisors to have career growth opportunities as well. Supervisory training enables office and/or nurse supervisors to:
- Know how to assess the learning needs of the care professionals on their team
- Recognize care professionals who have increased clinical and communication skills
- Support the career ladder and your organization’s culture of learning
Remember: Career ladder initiatives are unlikely to succeed without the support of the administrative staff!
Treat Your Career Ladder as a Business Initiative
So, are career ladders worth it? Find out by tracking outcomes pre- and post-implementation of your career ladder using the following metrics:
- Recruitment
- Retention
- Hospital readmissions
- Improved functioning with ADLs
- Overall client satisfaction
Investing in their employees through career development and advancement leads to increased productivity, reduced turnover, and higher employee morale. This investment provides an agency with a pool of more experienced, qualified employees who can take on higher-level positions and responsibilities. Ultimately, this results in an improved ROI for the company, care provided at the highest level, and a positive impact on every home care client.
Linda Leekley’s Bio
In her leadership role at HCP, Linda pulls from her decades of experience—in nursing, education, and entrepreneurship. In 1998, after years of working as a nursing supervisor and clinical educator in both acute care and home health care, Linda founded the healthcare training company, In the Know. For over 20 years, she demonstrated her passion for healthcare education by developing an ever-growing library of interactive, engaging, and effective training courses. In 2020, In the Know and HCP merged to create a powerful suite of management tools for pre-and post-acute organizations. As CCO, Linda guides a large team of nurses and instructional designers in their ongoing efforts to produce the highest quality training in the industry. When not working, Linda enjoys spending time with her family (including eight grandchildren) and exploring the beautiful beaches of North Carolina.