Social Worker Job Description Example, Duties, and Responsibilities

Social Worker Job Description Example, Duties, and Responsibilities

What Does a Social Worker Do?

The job description of a social worker involves offering assistance to people to enable them endure and rise above their challenges.

Direct-service social workers are involved in giving support to people and resolving problems or changes in their lives, including but not limited to coping with the death of a loved one, adoption of a child or someone diagnosed with a terminal ailment.

Social workers often work with various groups of individuals such as the elderly, children, people with mental health challenges, people with developmental disabilities and persons struggling with addiction.

However, a lot of them concentrate exclusively on particular clients. The category of the work varies with the setting.

Some specialize as hospital social workers, and others as school social workers, or family social workers.

Social work involves working with clients, their families, friends, as well as other organizations such as local authority departments, probation service units, schools and the police.

Social workers develop relationships with their clients and assist them in living a more successful life within their environment. This is usually achieved by helping them discover answers to their problems.

Social Worker Job Description Example

Social workers depending on their area of specialization are usually employed by health centers, private nursing homes, local education authorities and charities.

Below are some of the important duties, tasks, and responsibilities that make up the job description of a typical social worker:

• Appraising clients’ circumstances, needs, predicaments, and inner strength in order to establish explicit objectives
• Establish/create procedures to help the client enhance their total well-being and cope with their circumstances
• Give assistance to clients in the area of adjusting to new changes and challenges like unemployment, medical disorders or divorce
• Organize resources for the use of the client and introduce them to the appropriate support groups
• Support clients in receiving fundamental needs like social services, food stamps, medical services and child welfare
• Acknowledge emergency cases or critical issues and situations like a natural disaster or child abuse
• Follow-up and record improvements or services provided to ascertain progress in client’s condition
• Offering quality guidance, counseling and advice to clients
• Forming an affiliation with colleagues, relations and other professionals
• Making appearance in court and helping out in court cases when necessary

Creating a Resume for Social Worker Position

The sample job description shown above has information, including the duties and responsibilities of a social worker that can be used in making the professional experience section of a resume for the post. See detailed social worker resume here.

Requirements – Knowledge, Skills and Abilities – for the Social Worker Position

The most common requirement to be eligible to work as a social worker is a bachelor’s degree in social work.

Notwithstanding, professional qualification at degree level in courses such as sociology, psychology and other related field may be accepted for entry level positions by small community agencies.

Also, in clinical jobs and health settings, a master’s degree in social work is a valuable prerequisite. Other skills required for social work include:

• Emotional maturity, unprejudiced and sensitivity to clients and their problems
• Significant ability to set margins and agree with the boundaries of what can be achieved within a particular time
• Effective listening skills and ability to ask related questions per time
• Ability to manage information verbally conveyed and which is essential to the counseling aspect of social work
• Be conscious of body language and social forms of cultural behavior
• Capacity to give a self-appraisal of performance with a view to improving on it
• Efficiency in organizing, managing and prioritizing the analytical aspects of social work in providing purposeful services to clients
• Ability to reach a compromise and work effectively with multiple parties