Every student at Centennial College aspires to having a rewarding career, and the college works to prepare them for those careers. Some students want a career helping others, and for those students, becoming a Developmental Services Worker offers them the opportunity. It's a kind of social work focused on helping people with developmental disabilities become autonomous and independent, acquire work, and become contributing members of society. That's where Centennial College comes in. We talked to Kira Machado, a professor in the our Developmental Services Worker program, to learn more about the career, and why now is one of the best times to get into it.
What does a Developmental Services Worker do?
“It's a very, very broad area to work in, because we support people from birth all the way through end of life in all aspects of community living,” Kira says. “Our job is to enhance the capacity of, and create opportunities for, people with developmental disabilities of all ages, in all aspects of their life and community. For some people, there isn't a time in your day that you might not need a developmental service, worker.”
Where does a Developmental Services Worker work?
“We support people in their homes, in schools as educational assistants, and we support people in residential settings, like group homes and group care,” Kira says. “But we also work as job coaches helping people find employment, and support individuals in leisure activities, helping people find meaningful ways to spend their days. We have developmental services workers at the Hospital for Sick Children and CAMH, and we have workers helping one-on-one with individuals who decide to hire their own support worker to create this really big, great life for them.”
What kind of person do I need to be if I want to be a Developmental Services Worker?
“People who are really interested in building community, being advocates for social justice, who want to be a change maker, wanting to make a difference in their community,” Kira says. “Because for a very long time, people with developmental disabilities have been excluded from areas of community life, and the job of the developmental services worker is to really make way for people to be a part of their community, to have friends, to have meaningful work or volunteer opportunities, to have a home of their own if they choose. So what we really look for in developmental services are people who are looking to change the status quo and support others to do so. We also tend to attract outgoing people, because a lot of what we do is interacting with people in the community.”
What kind of job prospects would I have?
“We are seeing more full-time positions in our field open than we really have at any other time in the past decade,” Kira says. “It used to be kind of like gig work,” she continues, “and what we realized is we just can't retain a workforce that way, especially in a global pandemic. So there's been a lot of funding that's come into the Developmental Services sector to create more full-time positions. So if I was to go on a search right now to look up jobs for developmental services, I could probably find over 100 full-time positions in the GTA. And I'm not graduating 100 students, so the majority of our students found full-time employment before their final semester was over, through offers from their placements or offers from other agencies.”
Has the Ontario government done anything to support Developmental Services Workers?
“Starting in 2020, there was a $3 per hour temporary wage increase given to developmental services workers to recognize the work they were doing during the COVID-19 pandemic as essential workers,” Kira says. “Previous to that, there wasn't really a lot of knowledge about what developmental services workers do, how integral they are to the way our community and society function.”
“It was extended a few times, and was set to expire in March when the government made it a permanent $3 an hour wage increase. So the provincial government is providing funding to agencies and individuals who hire developmental services workers to make that wage increase permanent.”
What makes Centennial College’s Developmental Services Worker program unique?
“The most unique and appealing thing about our program is that we're really rooted in the life experience of people with disabilities,” Kira says. “There are other, more common and outdated models of disability that really look at disability from a medical lens, and view the job of developmental services as primarily a health care position, or a job that's hard and undesirable. At Centennial, we've flipped that notion around. We take a very social and social justice model of disability that looks at disability as a barrier created in the community. And we view that through the unique lens of the life experiences of people with disabilities. We have individuals with disabilities who are on our program advisory committee, who come to speak to our students about what's important to them in their lives and what they're looking for in a developmental services worker, and we have families who come and share with our students what is important to them when they look at hiring a developmental services worker.”
How does the program give me practical experience?
“What's unique about our program is that our students have two different placements,” Kira says. “So our students may be in a school, doing a placement shadowing an educational assistant in their third semester, and then in a hospital in their fourth semester, or in a residential setting. We need to give our students experience in all the different areas where developmental services workers can potentially help. I think we have some of the greatest placement partnerships, and we've worked really hard to maintain that. This year, my teaching partner, Joanna Niles, was able to forge a relationship with the Hospital for Sick Children. They had never had developmental services workers as placement students, and they previously didn't hire developmental service workers. We were able to say this is an area where we think developmental service workers can really benefit the patients at SickKids. There are many kids there who are neuro-diverse, who may be on the autism spectrum, who experience challenges with communication. And having someone who is uniquely trained to support these individuals is going to be an asset to both the hospital and those individuals and their families. We piloted two student placements at the Hospital for Sick Children, and now they're looking to hire three developmental services workers and make that a permanent position in the hospital.”
What should more people know about the career?
“A lot of people don't know about developmental services workers and the job they do, because of the lack of thinking people do about people with disabilities,” Kira says. “So if we don't know someone who has a disability, we don't have a family member or friend, or haven’t cared for someone, we're not generally thinking about people with developmental disabilities and how they're filling their days. But we need to position this as a valued career choice that's really, really important. And what we've learned through COVID is that we need to build a stronger and better system that supports and recognizes the skilled work that developmental service workers do. That really has to start at the college level with the training for the next generation of developmental services workers.”
Written By: Anthony Geremia