Featured Post

Tips for New Social Work Graduate (MSW) Students

-
Image
  Happy start of the school year! Perusing social media, I came across a NASW blog article called “Guide for the First Year Social Work Student”. This post provided lots of great information tailored for new undergraduate students interested in studying social work. I wanted to take that NASW post a bit farther and compile a list of tips specific to graduate students pursuing a masters in social work (MSW). In my opinion, graduate school is a completely different experience from undergraduate, so my hope is that these tips will serve to be beneficial. Tips for New Social Work Graduate (MSW) Students -Don’t worry about grades so much When I was in graduate school, one of my professors told a story about a straight A student who committed suicide several years after graduation. His point was that given the people we need to work with, we social workers need to focus less on being perfectionists (as demonstrated by obsessing over grades and test scores) and work on being empathetic and co
17 comments

Demand For Social Workers Expected To Grow

-
As I was watching the news recently, I saw this segment on the social work profession.  Nice to see the profession get some non-negative publicity, but I felt the need to repost this video to address some inaccuracies and lack of clarity.

Demand For Social Workers Expected To Grow « CBS Chicago

My thoughts:

1) Where I live, most entry level social worker jobs require a masters degree, though a BSW is sometimes acceptable. Typically, psychology and sociology degrees are NOT acceptable, though I've seen them in case worker and counselor positions. This profession really needs to work on getting some title protection in place, because it's degrading to have non-social workers doing work meant for and done best by people with social work degrees.

2) Anyone with a BSW and MSW can diagnose patients and provide interventions, therefore performing the function of what this report calls "clinical social worker". I mean, I was diagnosing patients as an MSW intern and my BSW friends were doing the same (with LCSW co-signature of course). I think whoever wrote this report meant to describe licensed social workers, who are able to diagnose, intervene, and practice independently. Licensed Clinical Social Workers (LCSW) are the ones that require 2+ years of experience (3,200 hours in California) and passage of licensing exams.

Anyway, it's nice to see a relatively positive job outlook for our profession. Hopefully the demand for social workers will mean an increase in our wages (as long as non-social workers don't hijack our jobs and as a result keep our wages low).  It's refreshing to know that job stability is something I don't necessarily have to worry about for the next decade!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I Want To Leave Social Work

-
Image
It's been a while since I've updated this blog. I actually wasn't sure if I would actually come back to it, but given recent events I have some free time on my hands and should keep occupied. With that said, let's cut to the chase. I'm burned out. After 10 years of being a social worker, I'm ready to leave the field. A few of the reasons are as follows:  1) Emotional and physical exhaustion  As we all know, social work is an extremely demanding job with high caseloads, emotionally taxing situations, and strict deadlines. Depending on how busy I am and how much caffeine I've had, I'm usually running on high alert so I could finish everything by the end of my shift and sit in traffic. Being in a continual state of stress has started wearing on me, and I find that as I age I'm not as physically and emotionally resilient as I used to be.   The social work profession promotes self-care as a way to prevent burnout. This is nice and all, but how can you ta
Read more

Tips for New Social Work Graduate (MSW) Students

-
Image
  Happy start of the school year! Perusing social media, I came across a NASW blog article called “Guide for the First Year Social Work Student”. This post provided lots of great information tailored for new undergraduate students interested in studying social work. I wanted to take that NASW post a bit farther and compile a list of tips specific to graduate students pursuing a masters in social work (MSW). In my opinion, graduate school is a completely different experience from undergraduate, so my hope is that these tips will serve to be beneficial. Tips for New Social Work Graduate (MSW) Students -Don’t worry about grades so much When I was in graduate school, one of my professors told a story about a straight A student who committed suicide several years after graduation. His point was that given the people we need to work with, we social workers need to focus less on being perfectionists (as demonstrated by obsessing over grades and test scores) and work on being empathetic and co
Read more

A Day in the Life of a Medical Social Worker

-
Image
One of the problems of being a medical social worker in a hospital is that my work is so varied that people get confused as to what I actually do! To give you a better idea of my job functions, here's a rundown of a typical day at work. At some point, I may write different versions based on what unit I'm working on and what model of social work the hospital uses. For a comprehensive overview of the medical social work profession, please go here: About Social Services at a Hospital A Typical Day in the Life of a (not so) Cheap Medical Social Worker  6:20am: Alarm clock goes off. I hit the snooze button. 6:30am: I drag myself out of bed, wash up, throw some clothes on, and slap my makeup on my face. 7:00am: I run out the door and proceed to sit in traffic for the next hour. 8:00am: I arrive at work, clock in, and head to my desk to print out the hospital census. After figuring out who all the new patients are, I go through each one to determine if they ne
Read more