The Survival Guide for Newly Qualified Child and Family Social Workers

Hitting the Ground Running

Helen Donnellan, Gordon Jack

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9781843109891
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857002075
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

So, you've passed your degree and have started your first job. But are you confident about translating the theory into practice? Are you prepared to juggle the workload of a busy social worker? Do you have a plan for your continuing professional development? This practical guide provides a wealth of suggestions to help you to hit the ground running in the early stages of your new career.

The book will guide you over the initial hurdles you will face in the transitional phase from student to employee. The Survival Guide for Newly Qualified Child and Family Social Workers provides a range of strategies for managing your time and workload, and offers suggestions for finding support, coping with stress and maintaining job satisfaction. Ways of handling difficult situations – with colleagues, managers and other professionals, as well as service users – which may be new and challenging are also explored. Each chapter concludes with a checklist of key points as a ready reference for practitioners preparing to face the daily challenges of their new professional status.

This invaluable guide will be an essential support for all students, post-qualification and returning practitioners specialising in the fields of child and family social work in sustaining their commitment to their chosen profession and working successfully within it.

Part I

Thud! Professional Status

Throughout Part I, we focus on the first few weeks of welcome, introduction and orientation to your first post as a qualified social worker and aim to ease your transition into the workplace in these very early stages.

The development of professional expertise and initial workplace motivators are primary considerations for Chapter 1 ‘Developing Professional Expertise’.

The change from student to employee in Chapter 2 ‘Transitional Change’ includes consideration of the ‘reality shock’ which frequently accompanies the ‘thud’ of professional status. It is commonly acknowledged that change is rarely achieved without some stress and anxiety so our consideration of ‘transitional change’ includes some social strategies, coping mechanisms and sources of support, adequate for the first few weeks in your new post. However, given the importance of maintaining your motivation and building job satisfaction for your longer term survival, we return in depth to the negative consequences of stress, positive coping mechanisms, finding support and making best use of supervision in Part III ‘Jumping the Hurdles’.

Preparations for Day 1 as well as a programme of basic introduction and orientation to your workplace are the main focus in Chapter 3 ‘Getting Started and What Helps’.

Part I concludes with a consideration in Chapter 3 of learning and reflection to anchor these two themes firmly at the very beginning of your professional development. You will see that they are woven throughout the text of the book and are revisited in different ways in Part II ‘Warming Up’ and Part IV ‘Going the Distance’, as you settle in and gradually take on a wider and more complex workload.

Chapter 1

Developing Professional Expertise

Professional identity

From novice to expert

Continuing professional development

Key considerations in developing as a professional

You will almost certainly have entered your new career with high expectations and motivation to become the best practitioner that you can. Your degree should have encouraged you to develop a commitment to ongoing enquiry and personal development, as well as equipping you with the skills to examine assumptions and use evidence to develop your own independent, critical judgements. These are the foundations of practice capable of meeting the challenges of complexity, uncertainty and unpredictability which characterise social work with children and families in the twenty-first century. But what is involved in moving forward from this point in your development towards becoming a fully established professional social worker? In attempting to answer this question, it is helpful, first of all, to consider what we mean when we talk about a profession, and related concepts such as professional expertise.

Professional identity

While professions can be defined in a number of different ways, most people would agree that they all involve claims to expertise, based on university-level specialist training, as well as official regulation. These characteristics mean that, to a greater or lesser extent, all professions exercise power and control, which promote positions of privilege, both socially and economically.

Issues of professional identity and concepts of the power derived from expertise have the potential to bring professionals into conflict, not only with one another, but also with those who use their services. However, the willingness of the social work profession to draw from a wide range of philosophies, ideas and methods, together with adherence to the principles of partnership working and anti-oppressive practice, have, to some extent, set it against the collective power associated with other professions. While consideration of these issues in relation to social work is therefore rather complicated, this should not prevent you from recognising in others, as well as aspiring to develop yourself, the sorts of knowledge and skills that give rise to legitimate claims of professional expertise. At the start of your professional career as a qualified social worker, it might be helpful for you to build up your own resource list of people who have particular areas of knowledge or expertise, including those in other agencies or professions, to whom you can turn for guidance and advice about specific aspects of your work (see Box 1.1).

Box 1.1 Defining an ‘expert’

Can you think of someone who you regard as an ‘expert’ social worker? What contributes to your understanding of this person as an expert?

Here are some possible reasons for your judgement:

•Advanced theoretical or subject knowledge

•Many years of experience in a particular role or area of practice

•High level practice skills or analytical ability

•Valuable personal attributes

What are the motivators?

Personal motivation has an important role to play in developing your professional identity and expertise. As an extract from an interview with a newly qualified social worker shows, for example, if money is your only motivator then you are probably in the wrong job.

“The money is part of it. Of course it is. It’s a job. But I wouldn’t be doing it for the money I get paid if I didn’t actually want to try and make a difference to people’s lives, because I do. And that’s the thing that holds me to the job, it’s the people that I work with … the variety … the chance to try and make a difference, but recognising that the majority of the time, it’s unlikely to. (Social worker, 12 months post-qualification)”

The chance to ‘make a difference’ was among the reasons most frequently cited by the participants in our own study for choosing social work as a career, and we return to this issue a little later. Here, however, we are thinking about what will motivate and sustain you in the very early stages of your post-qualification employment.

Box 1.2 Assessing your professional motivation

Using the scale of 1–10 for each factor, choose the number which best describes your current level of satisfaction for each motivator:

Autonomy

I am developing skills and confidence to make my own critical judgements

Not at all 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Completely

Challenge

I feel encouraged to take on new work and to try different approaches

Not at all 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Completely

Support

I feel supported in my personal and professional development

Not at all 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Completely

Acknowledgement

My role is clear and my work is recognised by the team and managers

Not at all 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Completely

The exercise in Box 1.2 identifies four factors which are frequently quoted by professionals as primary workplace motivators for you to consider: autonomy, challenge, support and acknowledgement.

Low scores in all four areas indicate perceptions of limited autonomy, challenge, support and recognition, suggesting that your practice resembles that of a ‘constrained conformist’, operating in a directed and reactive way. In these circumstances you may consider your role to be one in which expectations are limited to ‘doing what you are told’ and ‘toeing the party line’. Part of settling in to any new profession will involve an understandable and entirely reasonable preoccupation with how to get along in the system and get the job done. In the present context of public services in the UK, in which increasingly draconian political attitudes towards autonomy across the professions are evident, with power drawn away from individuals and towards central government, there is a tendency among many social workers to behave as constrained conformists. In what has become a very litigious society, organisations as well as individuals can struggle to maintain their independence, becoming risk averse to such an extent that autonomous professionalism is almost extinguished. The breaking down of professional skills into smaller, simpler activi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Of Related Interest
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Preface: The Background to this Book
• Introduction
• Part I Thud! Professional Status
• Part II Warming Up
• Part III Jumping the Hurdles
• Part IV Going the Distance
• References
• Subject Index
• Author Index