Social Workers

Keep our communities and our citizens on the path to success

In providing services to a growing community, you will find endless opportunities to help others overcome life's obstacles, achieve their dreams, and stay back on track to successful, productive lives. Here are some of the advantages we can offer your career:

• A large city: imagine how many lives you can help to improve with your work in a vast metropolis like Edmonton, and how many career paths you can pursue
• Extensive resources: Edmonton is committed to helping its citizens with a wide array of programs, ideas, and teams of dedicated personnel
• Comprehensive training: we'll make sure that you're prepared to deal with the basics of your position and then allow you the freedom to grow as your skills become more developed
• Supportive teams and management: whether you're proposing a new community program, or dealing with a challenging client, you'll have access to the advice and encouragement of our entire team
• Growth advancement opportunities: with many new programs and community outreach initiatives to pursue, you can move into many different areas of social work throughout the City
• Work/life balance: we offer the kinds of schedules that allow you to take care of your clients and communities, as well as yourself and/or your family.

What are the qualities of a great social worker?

Individuals and entire communities look to us for leadership, assistance and advice, which is why we look for these qualities in our social workers:

• Commitment to ethics: with so many people counting on you, we'll need to rely on your integrity to do the right thing for the community and each client
• Compassion: the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes and appreciate their challenges enables you to gain the perspective essential to meeting their needs
• Knowledge of social work: your education and experience will be put to the test with interesting challenges
• Fun personality: being a leader in the community requires that people find you approachable, outgoing and fun, when appropriate
• Creativity/ability to solve problems: finding the right solutions to situations that you encounter requires innovative thinking
• Appreciation for boundaries: knowing how far you can go in certain situations, and how much you can reasonably expect of others is vital to your success
• Passion for the City's mandate: you must be enthusiastic about working with people who are marginalized and in need of various forms of assistance
• Relationship-building skills: others must trust you to help them solve delicate problems and difficult situations.

Discover why our social workers love their work

Our social workers are quite committed to helping others, and do so on a daily basis. In their own words, here is why they so enjoy their work:

The environment is safe and positive. There are opportunities for growth and development. Those opportunities open the doors to work in other areas or different capacities, which help keeps things fresh and new. The compensation is good. And finally, you will never be bored here.

— Kaylin Betteridge, Social Worker

The City is fair, progressive, values safety, promotes equality in the workplace, and offers a wide variety of opportunities. The City allows its staff to be creative and innovative in its response to social issues, and supports services addressing social issues, such as family violence. It acknowledges the importance of Social Workers and their role in a municipality.

— Heather Morrison, Social Worker

What I find most rewarding while working for the City of Edmonton, is being a part of a multi-disciplinary team of professionals, and seeing the magic happen when true collaboration occurs and a new idea takes flight. When the work is grounded in what the community sees as most relevant and important to them, it fills me with a sense of accomplishment and pride.

— Robby Shearer, Community Building Social Worker