Tag: social work
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On Parental Leave
When my wife became pregnant with our third child, I’d just ‘officially’ graduated with my Master’s degree and was working on casual contract for the Government of Canada. A few months later, I became a permanent (‘indeterminate’) and among the benefits I was eligible to receive was Parental Leave Without Pay. Admittedly, this sounds like…
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On My Transformation from Social Worker to Public Servant
I read somewhere that the (median) average age of entry into the Canadian federal public service is 34 years old. That fits me reasonably well; this is my second career. For my first 10 years of “professional” employment I was a social worker, and my speciality was child and adolescent mental health. It was the…
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Embracing Serendipity
I came to work for the Government by accident, or so it would seem. Failure to earn a livable wage as a social worker with a growing family was what drove me from full-time employment and part-time Master’s courses (whenever I could balance them), and into full-time education and voluntary unemployment. Leaving employment had obvious repercussions,…