A Washington State University professor knows firsthand the importance of hiring well trained, qualified “senior living” professionals.

Scott Eckstein lived in an assisted living facility for a while to help settle his maternal grandparents into one. He also believes living in one may have prevented his grandmother’s death.

He knows the business side of the industry, too, as he used to develop senior living facilities and manage them.

“Most students have no idea what senior living is about. They think it’s an old folks home, and they see it’s more like a hotel that grandma and grandpa are living in—not like a hospital. There’s so many similarities between hospitality and senior living, so I tell the students, ‘This is not calculus and English. This is about how senior living fits with everything else you’re learning.’ To understand senior living is to understand what daily living is: How you engage residents, what’s the customer experience like, marketing. The senior wants to be cared for,” Eckstein said.

WSU recently launched an Institute for Senior Living through its Hospitality Business Management program. It comes on the heels of announcing the addition of an online senior living program to its hospitality business management curriculum in the fall.

The demand is there. The industry needs to recruit 1.2 million new employees by 2025, according to one industry study.

Managers are getting scarce to find and hire, with industry leaders resorting to stealing employees from each other, Eckstein said.

Rather than continuing to spar over workers, competitors decided to come together and turned to WSU for a solution, he said.

The new institute will focus on three major initiatives to develop the future work force: academic programs, industry partnerships and research.

The WSU Senior Living Management program was originally developed in partnerships with Aegis Living, Merrill Gardens, Emeritus (now Brookdale), and Leisure Care. Additional industry partners, including NIC and Argentum, have helped shape and expand the senior living management curriculum from a single introductory course offered as an elective under the hospitality business management major, to courses offered across the state and the new, online senior living certificate option.

The noncredit certificate program will help students gain a better understanding of the senior living industry with real-world industry experience through the school’s 1,000-hour internship graduate requirement. There are seven modules in the certificate program that range from finance and operations to leadership and risk management. The program is self-paced and takes students on average seven to 12 weeks to complete.

“We talk about international senior living. I explain it’s not just a U.S. issue. I teach about the history of the business, I teach about the care, and then you go on a field trip,” Eckstein said.

Further industry collaboration will help the institute eventually offer a new senior living major for undergraduate students, according to WSU officials.

Eckstein said the millennial and X generations are really interested in having an impact on lives and the future, and jobs in senior living fulfill that need while providing students with incredible career potential.

“Imagine every day you can go to work and make a difference,” he said. “You can make somebody’s life better every single day.”

Interest in the classes and certificate program have been phenomenal, Eckstein said, and industry leaders are already seeing the benefits.

Randy Cyphers, senior regional vice president of Brookdale Senior Living—the nation’s largest senior living provider that has facilities in the Tri-Cities, such as Brookdale Canyon Lakes and Brookdale Meadow Springs—is excited to see this program continue to grow.

“At Brookdale, we are always looking to attract, develop and retain top talent,” he said. “We’ve seen firsthand some of the incredible graduates who’ve completed this program and we look forward to seeing what the future holds for the next generation of senior living leaders.”

Eckstein started teaching senior living classes in spring 2016 and continues to do so at WSU’s Pullman, Vancouver and Tri-City campuses.

He didn’t intend to focus on the senior living industry. He wanted to be a real estate developer just like his grandfather. So, after graduating from college, he headed off to Washington, D.C., and landed a job in the industry. Little did he know, the real estate market was about to crash, taking his dream along with it.

“My job at the company was to figure out what to do if we were going to stay alive,” he said. “And I determined that we should be building for the senior market or the medical care office building market.”

But it wasn’t long before the viability of the market became the least of Eckstein’s worries. His grandfather became ill, and the family had to figure out how best to care for him.

“At the time, there was no assisted living. You went to a nursing home. So my grandma would live in the apartment they’d lived in for eons, and she’d visit my grandfather,” he said, adding that despite being fiercely independent she, too, suffered from medical issues.

“She ended up having an aneurism in her kitchen,” he said.

Nine hours went by before Eckstein’s grandmother was found.

She died on the way to the hospital.

“That had a major impact on me. If she were around people, people would have addressed it sooner. She probably would have still been alive,” he said.

Eckstein decided to change career paths and went back to school. He soon was hired by a company in California—but it wasn’t in the position he’d hoped for.

“I didn’t get into the operations side that I wanted to be on,” he said with a laugh. “I got into the real estate side. That’s how I worked my way into the business.”

His job took him overseas to Spain and Portugal, but eventually Eckstein returned and started calling his contacts in the industry, determined to get into operations.

It worked, and he landed a job as the director of Sunrise Senior Living in Santa Monica.

“I did that for a number of years … then they transferred me to the real estate side developing senior properties. I ended up as a real estate guy − again,” he said.

When Eckstein’s maternal grandparents began having medical issues, he had to leave work to care for them, going so far as to live in a senior community with them while they got settled in. When he returned to California, he received a phone call that would change his career trajectory yet again, sending him toward a job that encompassed the breadth of knowledge he had gained in the industry.

“My friend called and said, ‘Do you have a master’s degree,’ and I said, ‘Yes,’ and he hung up on me.”

Then he called me back a couple of days later and recruited him to apply at WSU.

For more information about WSU’s Senior Living Management program, call 424-262-1288.