Just one month after its original launch with venture capital company Kairos HQ, CareAcademy has expanded its caregiver job placement and training initiative.
CareAcademy is a Boston-based training platform for home care professionals. The company currently serves roughly 1,000 home care clients and locations. The company’s “Future of Work is Home Care” program aims to reskill 1 million new workers for the home care industry by 2023.
“The Future of Work is Home Care is really coming out of the necessity that we’re seeing born out of this moment and COVID-19,” Helen Adeosun, CareAcademy’s founder and CEO, told Home Health Care News. “We’re seeing the economy has left a lot of people unemployed and waiting for opportunities.”
Additionally, home care leaders are slowly seeing a rise in demand for their services, as seniors continue to shift away from nursing homes amid the public health emergency.
To meet that demand, providers are looking to dip into the pool of new job candidates — especially workers from the restaurant and hospitality industries — that has been created by the rise in unemployment in the U.S.
These circumstances have created an opportune time for “matchmaking” between home care companies and new caregivers, according to Adeosun.
As part of the program, potential caregivers will have the opportunity to enroll in a specialized, online “reskilling program” for caregivers. The program consists of four initial classes and the opportunity for additional training from home care companies.
Through the program, CareAcademy also matches caregivers with home care agencies, primarily through zip code.
“We wanted to make this as frictionless as possible,” Adeosun said. “We recognize that agencies have their own onboarding processes, … so [we] wanted to honor that by not making this too onerous. The idea is to provide a warm handshake to candidates who are interested in home care and to whet the appetite of folks who aren’t exactly sure what home care means — or what a career in health care means — via those four classes.”
This new iteration of the program plans to zero-in on millennials, she noted.
“Speaking as a millennial, we are the generation between the 2008 recession and this moment right now,” Adeosun said. “We’re meeting millennials exactly where they’re at, and that is by way of social media. As a result of our initial efforts to target millennials, we saw the ability to open up the aperture much wider.”
For this go-round, CareAcademy has brought on the Home Care Association of America (HCAOA) as a partner. Washington, D.C.-based HCAOA represents nearly 3,000 companies that employ more than 500,000 caregivers.
“HCAOA has sent out and is collaborating with CareAcademy to funnel in members who may be interested, have the capacity for this initiative and the desire to build their workforce,” Adeosun said. “Having that level of collaboration between Emma [Dickison] and Vicki [Hoak] has been absolutely tremendous. They are visionaries in their own right and see the opportunity.”
Emma Dickison is the president of HCAOA’s board of directors, as well as the CEO and president of Home Helpers. Vicki Hoak is HCAOA’s executive director.
When it comes to workforce challenges within the home care space, providers often find themselves playing the defensive. “Future of Work is Home Care” and similar programs are giving providers the chance to be proactive.
“There’s great energy behind home care,” Adeosun said. “This is a real opportunity to reshape what home care looks like and work in tandem with this type of energy. How do we best facilitate [opportunities]? How do we best help?”
Looking ahead, Adeosun is on the lookout for additional partnerships for the program. So far, CareAcademy has already received interest from job platforms that are interested in being part of the intuitive.
“Our main goal in this initiative is to elevate the value of home care, not just at this moment, but beyond,” she said. “We’ve been doing a lot of thought leadership, and now it’s just putting actions to those words. We’re looking for any partners — this is a call to action for folks to join us.”
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