Building Durham’s Child Care Workforce: Career Opportunities, Training and Local Insights

If you like working with children, becoming a Registered Early Childhood Educator (RECE) and an Early Childhood Educator Assistant (ECA) might be the career for you.  RECEs and ECAs help care for and support the learning and development of children from infancy to age 12. They plan and lead activities that encourage children’s intellectual, physical, social, and emotional growth while ensuring their safety and well-being.

ECAs work under the guidance of educators to provide care and support. Assistants provide care for infants and preschool to school-age children under the guidance of early childhood educators. Assistants lead children in activities to stimulate and develop their intellectual, physical and emotional growth and ensure their security and well-being.

They are employed in child-care centres, daycare centres, kindergartens, agencies for exceptional children and other settings where early childhood education services are provided.

 

Early childhood educator assistants

  • Support early childhood educators in carrying out programs that promote the physical, cognitive, emotional and social development of children
  • Engage children in activities by telling stories, teaching songs and preparing crafts
  • Prepare snacks and arrange rooms or furniture for lunch and rest periods
  • Assist with proper eating, dressing and toilet habits
  • Submit written observations on children to early childhood educators or supervisors
  • Maintain daycare equipment and assist in housekeeping and cooking duties
  • Attend staff meetings to discuss progress and problems of children
  • May assist early childhood educators or supervisors in keeping records.

 

Local Training

The Durham Catholic District School Board Child Care Assistant Training Program is an 18-week program that provides students with an opportunity to learn about theories and stages of child development, child care legislation, child care programming, earn 6 credits toward the Ontario Secondary School Diploma and gain on-the-job experience.

There are two intakes for the program:

September 1

February 1

The cost of the program per client is $395.  However, students accepted to the program for September 2026 will pay a reduced rate of $215, made possible through funding from the Region of Durham.

Opportunities for Child Care Assistants

The Durham Workforce Authority’s Jobs First Durham (JFD) shows that there are 95 active child care assistant posts on the site and 48 companies are hiring for these positions. Most of the postings (67) are for full-time jobs in the Durham Region. The postings are evenly distributed across Durham Region:

  • 21 Whitby
  • 16 Ajax
  • 16 Pickering
  • 15 Clarington
  • 13 Oshawa

The average posted wage is $21.94 per hour, a 4 percent increase in wages and almost $2.00 above the median wage for the Region.

Resource Hub

The JFD Child Care Resource Hub provides a centralized job board for those interested in a career in the early education and child care sector in Durham Region and provides just-in-time local labour market information to child care centre operators.  This enables both educators and operators to make data-informed decisions on the next steps for their career or their organization.

Our unique system pulls job postings from more than 50 different job boards.  This means you can avoid visiting multiple websites and scrolling past duplicate job posts without ever missing an opportunity that might be right for you.  Whether you are looking to start a career in child care or seeking to fill child care positions in your business, you will find resources designed to make accessing and using the JFD platform easy and efficient for you.

About the DWA:

The Durham Workforce Authority (DWA) is the leading source of Durham’s labour market intelligence and champions the development and maintenance of a sustainable workforce.

The DWA produces custom labour market information, an annual Labour Market Plan, and provides:

  • Durham Region demographics change, migration trends in and out, educational attainment of residents, and changes in employers in the local area by employee size and 3-digit NAICs.
  • Enhanced Jobs First Durham (JFD) data extracted from the DWA’s boutique job board with hyper-local information.
  • An update on Employment Ontario data.

The DWA provides just-in-time custom labour market information and often conducts custom fee-for-service research. If you are interested in local data, please don’t hesitate to contact the DWA.

The Province of Ontario partially funds the DWA to supply Labour Market Information (LMI) to the Region of Durham.