The Must-Have Soft Skills and Learned Abilities for Effective Social Work
Social work is one of those professions that you can’t fully prepare for just through an education. The same way nurses can’t learn what it feels like to watch a patient die and teachers can’t fully understand the immense weight of being responsible for 30 students until they’ve actually done it social workers will never know exactly what the job requires until they are out in the trenches.
You can get the credentials through book learning but to be great at the job you also need a strong combination of soft skills and learned abilities.
In this article, we take a look at what those talents are and how you can develop them to succeed in your social work career.
How Do You Become a Social Worker?
All social workers have a bachelor's degree in social work. Many also go on to receive graduate degrees. Through this training, they generally receive a comprehensive understanding of their responsibilities. However, the job also requires constant human interactions.
People skills are harder to teach. Social workers must constantly improve their ability to interact with others in order to be effective at their job.
What is a Soft Skill?
A soft skill is an ability that cannot easily be taught or learned. When people say soft skills, they generally mean things like communication. Organization. Charisma. Charm. Even empathy can be considered a soft skill.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that these traits cannot be developed or improved upon. While there will never be a class called empathy 101 you can still hone your ability to relate to and sympathize with people on your caseload.
The same is true of any of the other traits described above.
Self-awareness is the first step toward improving your soft skills. What areas are you lacking in?
Once you have figured out where you need to improve, you can begin making progress by identifying certain behaviors you want to display each day.
For example, if you worry that you are socially awkward, develop your conversation skills by making a point of speaking to a new person each day.
Most people will find that with repetition they can become significantly better at developing their soft skills.
Should You Wait to Get Good at Skills Before You Seek Employment as a Social Worker?
Maybe? Probably not. If you are truly passionate about social work and have already developed the required credentials, a lack of certain soft skills should not keep you from seeking a job.
In fact, most people feel that they develop skills on the job.
Baptism by fire? You could say that. If your livelihood depends on being a little more organized, you’ll probably figure out how to get to work on time or meet deadlines faster than you would if it was a self-imposed requirement.
In the headings that follow, we will take a look at soft skills you can nurture as you seek and then begin your first job as a social worker.
Communication
Effective communication consists of two parts:
• Clarity: When you explain something, people understand. This may sound simple, but that isn’t always so. Social workers often have to explain life-altering concepts to people on their caseload. A person who has recently been released from jail needs to understand what is expected of them or they may wind up back in prison. A family that is on the brink of court-enforced separation must know what steps to take in order to stay together. Even minor misunderstandings could have major ramifications when the stakes are as high as this.
• Listening: Active listening is the second part of effective communication. You need to understand what people on your caseload are trying to tell you. True active listening means that you stay in the moment while you are having a conversation. You’re not thinking about what you would like to say next. You are not worrying about when you will get to begin your lunch break. You are focused on not just what the person is saying but how they’re expressing it with their facial expressions and body language.
Active listening is important for two reasons. For one thing, it ensures that you completely understand where people on your caseload are and what they need. It also helps establish trust. Any social worker will tell you that the job becomes much easier when you have a productive working relationship with people on your caseload.
Empathy
Admittedly, there are limits to how much empathy a social worker can be expected to have. That sounds bad, but it’s an almost necessary reality of the work. You see people at some of the darkest moments. If you are overly empathetic that could ruin you.
The ideal social worker will feel compassion for people in their caseload, but will still be able to do jobs effectively without becoming overly emotional.
Many people find that their empathetic reactions to social work and flow. In other words, social workers may have moments where they feel very sensitive towards the needs of people on their caseload. They may also have moments where they experience what psychologists refer to as compassion fatigue.
Compassion fatigue is a sort of emotional exhaustion. You’ve seen so many bad things that the emotions don’t register the way they used to.
All of these reactions are normal and healthy. The key is to remain consistent in how you respond to the needs of people on your caseload.
Falling apart inside? Just don’t cry in front of the person on the other end of the desk. Miserably tired of hearing excuses? That’s also fine. Just make sure you stick to the handbook when it comes to how you respond.
Organization
Many social workers have overwhelmingly large caseloads. They need to be able to balance the needs of everyone they are responsible for.
This will mean retaining details about each case, keeping up with appointments, and generally ensuring that everything runs on time and is as effective as possible. Even people who are generally organized may struggle with this at first. Through repetition, however, most seasoned social workers will become very effective at managing their responsibilities.