Personal Support Workers

General Information about Personal Support Workers

Making about $15.00/hr. minimum, personal support workers are not regulated health care providers. They do work under regulated health care professionals or in an independent living environment with clients. Their work week consists of 40 hours with other benefits.

Their duties are to help older people or anyone who cannot take care of themselves through the tasks of their daily lives and to provide home management solutions. Personal support workers are responsible to their supervisors and their clients.
Once you graduate from your personal support worker studies, you would be ready for an entry-level position in institutional, as well as community settings. The people you would work with have physical, cognitive, emotional and behavioural challenges.

How long does it take to become a Personal Support Worker?

If you are going the route of a non-college, your courses would be accelerated. They can take a mere eight months to complete.

With an accredited college throughout Canada, most courses would take a little longer. You could complete the course anywhere from four semesters, taking up about one year, or up to two years. This is the exception of accelerated colleges that can take up to a year and a half.

Your course load would be about 30 hours a week (including homework and studying time), making it possible to take on a part-time job to help pay for school. Most courses would be offered during the daytime hours of 9 to 5. This would make evening and weekend work possible.

There is the option to do night courses as well. The length of time to complete the course as a personal support work would increase to about three years. This would then make it possible to take on daytime work to help pay for school.
How to pay for going back to school as a Personal Support Worker?

If you need to take out a loan to pay for school and you live in Ontario, for the time you are in school studying personal support work – you will not have to pay back your loan.

After you graduate there is something known as the Interest Relief program. With this program, you receive six months interest relief from re-paying your loan while you look for profitable work in the field as a personal support worker. Even when you do find a job and if it does not work out, you can request through the lending institution to receive interest relief again to lower the payments you would need to make for your loan.

If you find that your debt is too much to handle, there is also something called student loan consolidation that will help you make payments you can afford and manage.

You can consult the links below for more information about how to pay for your schooling as a personal support worker:

Province of Ontario Student Loans - Interest Relief Program
AMSA Student Loan Consolidation Primer
Canada Student Debt FAQ
CanLearn - Official Gov Site Dealing with Student Loans, Student Debt Consolidation, etc
Canadian Federation of Students
School Student Loan Debt Consolidation Institutions
Citi Financial Canada Loan Application
National Credit Consolidation
Wells Fargo Canada
Shield Credit of Canada

Marking Guidelines for the College Level

Marking can be one of the toughest things that a professor has to do. I have some guidelines that I go by that have been suggested to me by other professors:

You cannot mark all levels of different subjects the same. In general I stick to some basic rules that help depending on the level I am teaching.

If it is a first year class, I generally allow about three to five errors in a written document before I start to deduct marks for grammar, spelling errors and punctuation. Especially at the beginning of the course when many of the students may have come out of high school, I try to make allowances that they are still learning how to write. I do not tend to completely re-write their text, unless there are some major problems. I try to keep in mind that not everyone writes the way I do and that I should let their individuality and creativity shine through their assignments. They are not in school to learn how to write like me, they are there to learn how to write their best.

If it is a second year class, I generally allow only three errors at a maximum before I start deducting marks.

If it is a third year class, I allow about two errors. For a fourth year class I allow one. If the class is a post-graduate certificate class, I expect flawless copy and will start deducting marks at the slightest error of spelling, punctuation and grammar.

I find this to be a fair way to do my marking. Other things I keep in mind when marking is to make sure I am really impressed with the work. If I am really impressed with what the student has done, generally they will receive A standing. If I think they could have put a lot more work into the story or written work, or audio assignment...they receive lower marks.