Diploma in Social Service Worker

Students enrolled in this program are eligible to register for our Specialized Academic Certificate, Indigenous Knowledges: First Peoples in Canada, and earn an additional credential. A fee may apply. For more information, click here. The Centennial College Social Service Worker program prepares you to become a critical practitioner, advocate, problem solver, and agent of social change. Throughout your studies, you will explore the expanding roles and responsibilities of Social Service Workers within a rapidly evolving social landscape. You will build the knowledge, skills, values, and ethical foundations required to work effectively with diverse individuals, families, groups, and communities. This two-year diploma, grounded in an anti-oppressive and social justice framework, integrates core Social Service Work principles with applied skills and reflective practice. You will engage deeply with themes such as anti-Black racism, Indigenous worldviews and approaches, power, privilege, and oppression, interpersonal communication, counselling, community development, case management and advocacy, mental health, harm reduction, and trauma-informed care, power and social movements, and social policy. These learning experiences form the essential foundation for your professional practice. Through critical thinking and self-reflection, you will examine how personal values, social ideologies, and structural forces shape both social problems and the solutions we create. Graduates leave the program prepared to begin their journey as emerging social change practitioners. With a Social Service Worker diploma from Centennial College, you will be equipped to work in a wide range of settings, including governmental organizations, community agencies serving adults, children, youth, and seniors; homeless shelters, shelters for individuals, families, women, and youth; organizations supporting people with developmental disabilities or those on the autism spectrum; food banks, employment centres, and settlement agencies. These examples reflect only a fraction of the wide-ranging opportunities available ranging opportunities available to graduates. With Social Service Worker diploma, you are equipped to work across a wide variety of community and human‑service settings. Your training prepares you to contribute meaningfully to multiple sectors of the social service field. Successfully completing the Social Service Worker program will give you the ability to: Develop respectful and collaborative professional and interpersonal relationships that adhere to professional, legal, and ethical standards aligned to social service work. Record information accurately and communicate effectively in written, digital, verbal and non-verbal ways, in adherence to privacy and freedom of information legislation, in accordance with professional and workplace standards. Integrate a practice framework within a service delivery continuum, addressing the needs of individuals, families and communities at micro, mezzo, macro and global levels, and work with them in achieving their goals. Plan and implement accessible and responsive programs and services, recognizing the diverse needs and experiences of individuals, groups, families and communities, and meeting these needs. Examine current social policy, relevant legislation, and political, social, historical, and/or economic systems and their impacts for individuals and communities when delivering services to the user/client. Develop strategies and approaches that support individual clients, groups, families and communities in building the capacity for self-advocacy, while affirming their dignity and self-worth. Work from an anti-oppressive, strengths-based practice, recognizing the capacity for resilience and growth of individuals and communities when responding to the diverse needs of marginalized or vulnerable populations to act as allies and advocates. Develop strategies and approaches to implement and maintain holistic self-care as a member of a human service profession. Work with individuals, groups, families and their communities to ensure that service provider strategies promote social and economic justice, and challenge patterns of oppression, discrimination and harassment, and sexual violence with clients, coworkers and communities. Develop the capacity to work with the Indigenous individual, families, groups and communities while respecting their inherent rights to self-determine, and to identify and address systemic barriers that produce ill-effects, developing appropriate responses using approaches such as trauma informed care practice. Develop creative approaches to social service work practice that meet social enterprise objectives and the needs of a changing workforce.