Senior Living Operators Are Ready to Grow, But Those Plans Hinge on Leadership Development

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Senior living providers are energized about growth looking ahead to 2027, but that growth hinges on the people who work in their communities.

This was one of my biggest takeaways from my conversations with senior living leaders at the 2026 NIC Fall Conference in Chicago. At companies like Discovery Senior Living, Priority Life Care and others, leaders have committed to longstanding staffing strategies such as developing career paths and recruiting from outside the typical labor pool.

“Inside your workforce are your next leaders,” Discovery Senior Living CEO Richard Hutchinson told me. “I am convinced of that.”

Bonita Springs, Florida-based Discovery builds up community and company leaders with the help of a lead career growth program developed in partnership with DePaul University. 

Staff development and growth go hand-in-hand, Priority Life Care CEO Sevy Petras told me.

“If we are not growing or expanding in different ways, I am not doing my job of offering our staff more opportunities,” Petras told me.

Zooming out the lens, the senior living industry has a great need in front of it, both in terms of demand from customers and the need for workers to run their communities. While companies can now do more with less using technology, operators believe humans are still what drive senior living forward.

A good leader can mean the difference between a high-performing community and one that is treading water. They can also inspire the people who work with and for them to achieve a higher standard, such as notching higher margins than in the past. And it’s clear to me that if the industry wants to grow to meet that demand, it will need new leaders, fresh faces and original ideas.

In this week’s subscriber-only SHN+ Update, I look at why senior living operators must tie career advancement with their growth plans and offer these takeaways:

• Why career growth must go past training employees 

• How scale and multiple career paths can make advancement possible 

• Why operators must identify and prepare future leaders before they are facing vacant positions 

Training vs. Teaching

In a senior living industry where turnover can range between 40% and 85%, depending on the position, according to data from the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing and Care (NIC), offering career paths can mean the difference between someone staying and leaving.

In 2026, Wiley Workplace Intelligence research involving 1,459 respondents found that 84% of employees whose managers always had time to develop them said they were “very likely to stay” with their organizations, according to reporting on the findings.

In its 2025 Workplace Learning Report, business social media website LinkedIn found that 88% of organizations were concerned about employee retention and that providing learning opportunities was respondents’ No. 1 retention strategy.

But there is a problem that goes beyond senior living. A 2024 Gallagher report, drawing on a survey of 3,552 U.S. organizations, identified career development as a driver of engagement and retention, yet fewer than half, 43%, supported employees in developing and pursuing a career path.

In contrast, the average senior living company has many growth opportunities for one to advance their career. There are countless stories within the industry of former CNAs or executive directors rising to the corporate level. Some even lead operating companies today.

Hutchinson stressed that training and teaching are not the same thing. Training can help an employee do a job well or understand future responsibilities. But he described teaching as a “more deliberate process” that takes into consideration how people digest information and what they are capable of achieving.

“You have to understand the capabilities of the person before you go ahead and set out a path for them that’s so aspirational they can’t do it,” Hutchinson told me.

Near the end of 2026, Discovery manages nearly 28,000 employees. Through September of this year, thousands of them had elected to take career advancement courses on their own time. The company also uses its Learning and Development Center to help train executives in operations and sales across its network of communities.

His comments on overall employee appetite for career growth are encouraging. To me, where the rubber meets the road is turning career education into actionable career advancement.

Priority Life Care is changing its career education process to be more personalized, identifying skills employees are less confident in after their initial time on the job after hire. Testing and reassessment help shape what employees can be trained in.

“Training and development has to be much more person-centered,” Petras told me.

Growth must offer advancement

It’s common for senior living operators to swap leaders. As many have told SHN over the years, that risks circulating old ideas from one company to another.

It takes longer than recruiting an experienced executive, but I think developing structured programs that train and promote qualified staff is a more sustainable approach to staffing.

That requires the scale to accommodate career advancement, Hutchinson and Petras told me. If a provider only has one senior vice president of operations, a motivated regional leader may face a long wait for the next opportunity. When staff jump ship, companies lose out on the institutional knowledge and daily experience employees have in understanding the ins and outs of community operations.

I am not saying that every operator needs to be a national, coast-to-coast senior living provider, but it means that providers must be transparent about which advancement opportunities staff can actually access.

Priority Life Care recently announced a $275 million strategic partnership with Almanac Realty to offer capital to fuel the Fort Wayne, Indiana-based provider’s future growth efforts. Employees told Petras they want company ownership stake opportunities in the company’s future success.

“They want to be owners, and this is a way for us to offer that in a more shielded way to some degree rather than being your own boss,” Petras told me.

This is an important next step from career advancement in my mind. Employees should not only see how their hard work is helping a business succeed, but reap the financial benefit of those efforts.

Ebenezer President and CEO Brett K. Anderson emphasized the value of both maintaining scale for future career growth chances and having multiple business lines connected to a senior living portfolio. The Edina, Minnesota-based provider’s cooperative housing model, along with traditional roles in assisted living and skilled care, plus things like an in-house pharmacy, creates an ecosystem where employees can choose the direction they want to grow. 

“I think scale and diversity in the business lines is critical,” Anderson told me.

He also told me that supporting employees that want to remain in their current roles is just as important as advancement because it can improve retention, culture and morale. An employee who wants to be an accomplished resident assistant or line cook should have access to things like mentorship and training.

This extends the opportunity for operators that don’t have the scale to promote large-scale career advancement, as career growth could mean a stronger understanding of a role, or finding a role that better fits an employee’s current stage of life. But what ties this all together for me is that the opportunity must be palpable.

Providers must find their next leaders sooner rather than later

Recognizing potential and finding talent must also be a skill of corporate leaders in senior living today.

Aegis Living President and future CEO Dirk Burghartz told me about an Aegis employee who started as a care manager after serving in the armed services and was promoted to regional vice president. He said this type of progression is an example of the talent operators need to recognize and grow.

Through Aegis’ Elevate program, director-level staff apply and are given a readiness review. If selected, they complete six months of training, and successful completion of the program moves participants into director of operations roles on the road to becoming an executive director. In 2026, Bellevue, Washington-based Aegis was averaging two or three participants annually, but Burghartz told me that the company aims to “double” that figure. 

This is the type of direct assessment operators must take alongside their physical growth plans. These established programs are important, but understanding the scale at which they can function is important to meet sustainable leadership hiring needs across a company.

Another barrier is fighting what Aegis Development President Adam Clark told me was “imposter syndrome,” in that some capable and talented staff don’t believe they have the chops to advance into leadership roles. To solve this, providers must be able to identify and motivate those stalwarts at the community level that could have potential as a future leader.

Having an eye for leadership talent is an important and potentially overlooked part of internal staffing development because providers could have these established programs but still miss out on qualified and talented staff who would never apply or nominate themselves for a program like Aegis’ Elevate.

Houston-based Belmont Village President Mercedes Kerr told me that this talent identification was just as critical as having an internal leadership development pathway already established. She described employees who started as servers and became executive directors, as well as culinary paths that could get someone from dishwasher to chef. 

“How do you identify the talent that you’re going to feed into the pipeline?” Kerr asked me.

I think this question connects with the efforts I heard a lot about during the 2026 NIC Fall Conference in Chicago. Discovery is focused on how people learn. Priority Life Care is personalizing education and career advancement. Ebenezer is creating multiple business lines for employees to choose their path. Aegis and Belmont Village are identifying and preparing employees who could lead the next generation.

Operators need all of these elements, and that starts with helping employees understand potential and showing them what pathways are possible in career growth. To me, this is the right direction, and operators must view career advancement and leadership development as more than continuing education or on-the-job training.

The senior living industry will still need outside recruits, but hiring the same experienced leader from another operator is not sustainable.

If providers want to sustain their growth plans, they must be better at creating internal capacity. Leadership development and career advancement should be just as important as acquisition or development pipelines.