Becoming a Social Worker

INTRODUCTION

Social workers are frontline workers, counseling families in crisis, helping survivors of domestic violence, finding foster homes for children. They may be overburdened, overtired, overextended, and overwhelmed—but rarely do social workers get bored.

It’s hard to be bored when you’re working with people at their most open, unguarded, and vulnerable. Social workers do a great many things: they are substance abuse counselors at celebrity rehab centers and psychotherapists in private practice; they staff abortion clinics and homeless shelters; they’re caseworkers just out of college and high-level administrators with decades’ worth of experience under their belts. Social workers work in courtrooms and hospitals; at Ivy League universities and inner-city high schools; on military bases; in nursing and residential care facilities; in corporate human resources departments and labor union offices.

Social workers help shape public policy at city, state, and federal levels. In the field, they conduct research (one-on-one interviews, focus groups, surveys) that influences our understanding of social formations and the human mind. In fact, those two poles—social formations and the human mind—are the things social workers find themselves balancing daily, because social work is rooted in the idea that individuals are inseparable from their environments.

Social work is an ever-expanding profession: if there’s a void—some systemic social problem that isn’t being addressed—social workers rush in to fill the vacuum. As a result, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates, the profession is expected to grow by 13 percent by the end of the 2020s—much faster than the average for all other occupations.

But what are social workers, exactly? What kind of work do they do?

According to the National Association of Social Workers, the primary mission of the social work profession is to enhance human well-being and help meet the basic human needs of all people, with particular attention to the needs and empowerment of people who are vulnerable, oppressed, and living in poverty.

What this means is that social workers advocate for individuals and ensure that their most fundamental needs—nutrition, education, health, and mental health care—are being met. At the same time, social workers fight for social justice and change.

In day-to-day terms social workers work collaboratively with clients to determine their goals, help them navigate bureaucratic systems, and offer emotional support. They provide referrals and connect clients to basic resources, such as housing, health care, education, mental health care, and/or public assistance. Whether or not they work as therapists, social workers may also find themselves providing psychotherapeutic services. And in crisis situations, such as domestic violence and child abuse, social workers step in to deescalate the problem and provide safety.

A client who’s had all their needs met, or now has the ability to meet their own needs, no longer requires a social worker. A society that is perfectly fair, just, and equitable would have no use for social workers, either. In that sense, the social worker’s ultimate goal is to render their own job obsolete.

THERE’S NO ONE PATH to becoming a social worker. At the undergraduate level, aspiring social workers can earn a bachelor of social work (BSW) degree. But it’s not unusual for social workers to major in English, psychology, sociology, or other subjects. Nor is it unusual for social workers to come to the job after working in another profession. In social work, lived experience counts, and a BSW is not a requirement for graduate school.

In graduate school, students generally complete foundational courses in human behavior and the social environment, research, and social welfare policy before choosing a track or concentration. Most programs offer concentrations in clinical practice (mental health), generalist practice (administration, community organizing, and program development), and policy practice (research, policy analysis, and policy advocacy). Along with their coursework, students are expected to complete two internships (field placements), working three days a week in schools, hospitals, nonprofits, city agencies, or community health centers, carrying caseloads, receiving supervision, and gaining intensive hands-on training. Interns are also required to complete weekly process recordings, writing sessions out verbatim while describing their thoughts in the margins. While these documents are time-consuming and tedious to write, they are also tremendously useful. In the course of reviewing them, supervisors offer feedback on the students’ responses to clients, critiquing questions and noting instances of bias and projection.

Typically, social workers complete their programs in two years, graduating with a master of social work (MSW) degree. Afterward many will complete state exams to become a licensed master social worker (LMSW)—a necessary step for employment at some agencies. In order to become clinical social workers, who provide therapy and counseling to individuals and/or groups, they must complete approximately 2,000 hours of direct therapeutic work with clients under the supervision of a licensed clinical social worker. They then take a clinical licensing exam and become a licensed clinical social worker (LCSW), which allows them to open a private therapy practice.

After graduation and licensing, social workers grow into a wide variety of jobs, from therapist to researcher to director of clinical services, in any number of settings, such as schools, hospitals, prisons, mental health clinics, medical clinics, private practice, nonprofits, government agencies, and child welfare agencies. The populations a social worker encounters might include families and children (often those living in poverty), people with disabilities, and people suffering from substance abuse problems or mental illness. Social workers serve the elderly, immigrants, and refugees, but they also work with middle-class and even prosperous clients. The field is remarkably broad—it offers a wealth of employment opportunities—and yet, there are several things social workers have in common.

Social workers are passionate about people, passionate about social justice, and passionate about the work that they do. They are strong advocates for individuals who may not be able to advocate for themselves. Social workers are natural problem-solvers, and empathetic ones, able to see each issue from several perspectives. They are active listeners as well as critical thinkers. All social workers are trained to follow these guiding principles:

person-in-environment approach

meeting the client where they are

strengths-based perspective (resilience)

cultural consciousness

social and economic justice

Here’s what those principles mean in practice:

Person-in-environment approach. The idea of assessing individuals within the context of their specific social environments is central to social work. Social workers believe that people are inseparable from the environments in which they were raised, and in which they live and work now.

Meeting the client where they are. Social workers don’t push their clients to change; they know that doing so can be counterproductive and often backfires. Instead, social workers adapt to move at the client’s own pace and encourage them to come up with their own plan of treatment.

Strengths-based perspective (resilience). Social workers focus on their clients’ determination and resiliency, their aspirations, and their assets. On an interpersonal level this may involve an assessment of clients’ support networks, their families, and/or their faith. On a societal level it may involve a judgment-free approach to stigmatized populations, such as the homeless and those who struggle with substance abuse.

Cultural consciousness. Social workers are expected to examine their own backgrounds and biases, their values, and personal assumptions. They strive to be aware of their privileges and powers so that they can approach clients with cultural humility and—as they work with specific populations—study the norms and values of those populations without consciously or unconsciously imposing their own beliefs.

Social and economic justice. Social workers empower individuals and groups to strive for economic equity and social equality. They are committed to community outreach, grassroots organizing, and lobbying.

All of these principles are foundational to social work going all the way back to the profession’s beginnings.

SOCIAL WORK AS IT is practiced in the United States has its roots in nineteenth-century Europe. Elizabeth Fry visited Newgate Prison in London in 1813 and, appalled by what she saw there, worked tirelessly (and successfully) to effect prison reform in England. At around the same time, a Scottish clergyman named Thomas Chalmers started working with the urban poor in Glasgow, making home visits, strengthening community ties, and ensuring that children received secular as well as religious educations. Jean Henry Dunant, a Swiss businessman, established the Red Cross in 1863 and organized the Geneva Convention in 1864; he was awarded the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901.

Eighteen sixty-four was also the year that another English reformer, Octavia Hill, started buying dilapidated houses in London to facilitate the care and empowerment of her poor, often unemployed tenants. Hill believed that it made no sense to work with an impoverished population without taking environmental concerns like housing and education into account. She encouraged her assistants to form personal relationships with tenants in order to work toward bettering their lives.

Arnold Toynbee, who taught economic history at Oxford (and was an uncle of the historian Arnold J. Toynbee), was also decades ahead of his time. Toynbee—who popularized the phrase industrial revolution—believed that industrialization had produced wealth without producing well-being. He opened libraries for industrial workers, encouraged students to work directly with underserved populations, and worked himself to death before reaching his thirty-first birthday. A year later, in 1884, the first settlement house opened in the East End of London. Named Toynbee Hall in his honor, it housed poor students from Oxford and Cambridge and provided a number of social services, including courses in nursing, writing, sewing, citizenship, and hygiene.

Three years later, in Chicago, a woman named Jane Addams read an article about Toynbee Hall. In 1888, she and her partner, Ellen Gates Starr, traveled to London to see it for themselves. Deeply impressed, Addams and Starr established Hull House in Chicago. This was the first American settlement house.

At Hull House immigrants from Bohemia, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Greece, Poland, and Russia could take English classes and American government, cooking, and music. Working mothers had access to an in-house kindergarten and day care center. Hull House hosted an employment bureau, an art gallery, a girls’ club, a fitness center, a library, and a theater. It provided job training for unskilled workers and temporary foster care for children. Settlement houses started to spring up in cities all over the country. By 1910 there were more than four hundred. By 1920 there were close to five hundred.

Settlement houses were instrumental in ending child labor and establishing juvenile courts. The United States Children’s Bureau was started by the leaders of Hull House in 1912 and run by a Hull House alumna named Julia Lathrop; in 1913 it launched its first research program, investigating infant mortality. The settlement houses viewed populations they served in terms of their environments, endeavoring to provide them with the means to lift themselves out of poverty.

Social work as a profession came into its own at the turn of