Senior residents of Ottawa can now breathe a little easier. Due to the increasing need for retirement communities in the greater Ottawa area, Algonquin College’s School of Hospitality and Tourism has launched their first ever Retirement Communities Management program which started earlier this month.
This one-year Ontario Graduate Certificate program has been specifically designed to align with and operate under the Retirement Home Act of Ontario and the Retirement Communities Management program will provide students with the overall knowledge and skills for working in the retirement community industry, as well as preparing experienced managers and administrators for advancement in retirement community management.
“It’s really interesting because the mix of students just in our first cohort, which is a small cohort is that there are actually people already working in the industry, they’re just trying to get a credential,” Altaf Sovani, Chair of the school’s Hospitality and Tourism department said of the program. “The way we have designed this is that we only deliver this course three days a week so students can still keep their full time jobs.”
The program took about three years to implement, due to the college not being ready and not having the space or resources to run this type of program, and was only given the green light in October 2015. Therefore the program had less than two months to market itself and is currently running with only around 10 students.
“Right now we use word-of-mouth,” Phil Rossy, program coordinator said of the current marketing practices. “As well, this spring we’re going to be marketing it down in Toronto with the Ontario Retirement Communities Association which is called ORCA.”
Rossy is optimistic that the program will get marketed extensively and that it will attract a fair number of interested parties in the coming months and year.