The strategies employed by regulators and educators to prepare and license or certify the workforce, and to assure that personnel are able to keep pace with changes in the clinical knowledge base and new technologies, are not effective. There are developing competency-based standards that would help guide the workforce across occupations and settings, but these standards have not been widely disseminated or adopted at the policy and practice levels. Additionally, there is a huge shortfall of personnel who are competent and committed to educating and preparing both professional and direct-care workers for careers in delivering services to older adults. This translates into a dearth of people—of those who are currently working and of those who are in the pipeline—that are adequately trained and educated to assume increasingly complex jobs across the continuum of services.