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What You Need to Know About a Career in Social Care
When you are choosing a career path, there are several things you need to consider. You want to make sure that your job can pay enough to allow you to live comfortably, as no one wants to deal with financial woes if they can avoid them. You also want to make sure that there are opportunities for you to grow and move up the career ladder and chances to feel challenged rather than find yourself feeling bored in your role. Your career needs to allow you to shape a happy future and provide you with stability, but it also needs to give you satisfaction in other ways. Everyone has different passions in life, and you don’t always get to make a career out of your favorite hobbies. However, it is important to still find a job that can offer you that sense of purpose, and despite the hard days that you will inevitably have at work, you’ll love what you do enough to make those tough times worthwhile.
Many people are driven by a strong desire to help others and make a difference in their local community and beyond. There are countless careers out there that can allow you to do this, but one path you might be interested in if you do want to help others is social work. If you have been contemplating getting into this line of work, there are a few things you should know before you start taking those steps to help you determine whether or not this would be the right fit for you.
What is Social Care?
Social care includes various essential services to help those who are vulnerable in society, whether that is due to mental or physical health problems, supporting families that might be struggling, and looking after children and adults alike. It is there to help those more vulnerable individuals and families live independently and with better stability than perhaps they have previously. Those who need this type of support can contact their local authorities and start the relevant processes for their circumstances. In some cases, individuals or families may be contacted by social services directly for welfare checks if a concern has been reported by neighbors, relatives, colleagues, or children’s school teachers.
What Are the Different Career Paths within Social Care?
As social care covers a variety of areas, a career in this sector can also provide a wide range of job roles that you can explore. You could choose to work with children or adults if you would prefer to work with a more mature age group. You could be working with those who need to find suitable housing or living facilities, or work alongside healthcare teams to support those with disabilities or who need mental health support. Here are a few more detailed examples of the roles you can choose within the social care sector.
- Child Protection
If you are driven by your desire to help vulnerable children, this could be the area of social work that interests you the most. When you are working in CPS, you will have cases allocated to you, and it will be your responsibility to assess whether or not a child is in a safe environment at home, and to help to protect them from violence and other types of abuse. You will work with the families to create a more positive, healthier, and nurturing living environment for the children in the household and support the parents/guardians to help them do this. You may also need to help find foster homes for children whose circumstances require them to live in foster care until their parents or legal guardians are deemed fit to care for them again, and you are confident that they will be returning to a safe home. While there will be other responsibilities you will have during your career in CPS, this is a brief explanation of the main aim of your role in this field.
- Advocacy Worker
Like CPS, in this role, you will be allocated cases and work directly with individuals who are using social services. As an advocacy worker, you will be there to help make sure that the individuals you are working with have their voices heard and ensure that they are getting the right kind of support. This might be helping them with concerns they may have regarding housing, medical treatments or therapies, and other important decisions that are being made that will impact their lives. You will be working as a liaison between those individuals and the other services that they are using to make sure that the right care is being offered.
- Housing Support
As the name suggests, working in housing support will be a role where you will be directly helping those who need to find suitable homes. This might be working with the homeless to find them safe shelter or a temporary or permanent address to help them open bank accounts and find work, for example. You will also be working with those who are on housing benefits schemes to help them understand how these schemes work and what their options are. This role can also include tasks such as administration to support those individuals you work with, filing tenancy agreements and financial records, carrying out risk assessments with individuals to make sure they are in a safe space, and helping them find other important community services that they might need.
- Social Worker
This is the role that people likely think of the most when they talk about social care. As a social worker, you might be working directly with children in CPS, but you can also work with vulnerable adults who need safeguarding and support as well. As a social worker, you will be working with individuals or families and offering them counseling, advice, and advocacy for their circumstances. In this role, you will be the one to help determine what kind of support and care someone needs, assess their circumstances and well-being, keep records, and write reports for your various cases. You will also work with other organizations, such as the police, healthcare services, schools, and probation services.
- Welfare Rights Officer
Working as a welfare officer, you will be helping those that rely on benefits for housing, employment benefits, and disability allowances to make sure that they are claiming the right benefits for their circumstances. You will be helping them fill in application forms for the benefits that they are entitled to, speaking for them on their behalf, or helping them to represent themselves if they are able. You’ll need to learn about and stay updated on benefits laws and regulations, as well as welfare reforms. Usually, welfare officers will work in citizens’ advice centers, charity organizations, or housing associations.
These are just a few examples of the different roles within the social care sector, but there are many more you can look into if you want to see what other options are available to you.
What Education and Training Do You Need?
The kind of education or training qualifications you will need will entirely depend on the role you are interested in. Some jobs in social care do not require a college degree, but rather on-the-job training. However, other roles will look for graduates as candidates provided that they have a degree in a relevant field. These jobs include, but are not limited to, social workers, probation officers, psychological well-being practitioners, care home managers, and education welfare officers.
If you are interested in a certain role within social care, always do your research to find out exactly what qualifications you will need to get. If you do need to get a college degree but are worried about fitting your studies around your current job or other commitments, you may want to explore online degree programs, as they can often be more flexible, allowing you to work and study at the same time and making that easier. If you want to progress in your social care career, you may also need to look for higher degrees, like a master’s or Ph.D., or perhaps take further training programs offered to you by your employer.
Salary Expectations
Again, this will all depend on the kind of role you choose to pursue in the social care sector. However, the majority of roles can offer comfortable salaries, and with career progression opportunities, there is the chance to earn more later on in your career. Typically, a social worker’s average salary was around $51,760 in 2020. This can also change depending on the state you are working in, your qualifications, and so forth. Overall, social work can offer a comfortable salary for the most part, but you will need to do further research on the specific role you want to pursue and the area you live in.
Is Social Work a High-Pressure Job?
All jobs come with pressure in some form or another, but certain careers can be worse for this than others. Social work can be a high-pressure career path, as you are working with vulnerable people who are relying on you for help. You may find certain circumstances upsetting, particularly when working with children, and this isn’t something that everyone is cut out for. Other factors can come into play when you work in social care that sometimes might mean you aren’t able to give the quality of service you would like, whether that is issues in other departments, poor communication, or other factors that might be out of your control.
Although working in social care can be very rewarding in a lot of ways, the pressures that can come with this line of work can be off-putting for many. If you do think you would be happy to face these challenges, you must be taking the time to look after yourself and practice good self-care to help you get through the tougher parts of the job. Look at these tips for social care workers to get an idea of what you can do to take care of your well-being in these roles.
What Are the Benefits?
While this can be a challenging career path, there are numerous benefits to working in social care that make it worthwhile. You will be working with a variety of people each day, whether that is colleagues or people who need your help. Knowing that you are doing something beneficial for your local community and supporting those in need can be incredibly rewarding, and seeing those individuals and families work towards a better life and get the support that they need is truly satisfying.
Another benefit of choosing social care as a career is that it can offer stability, as these services will always be necessary and in demand. As highlighted above, there are various roles within this sector to explore, so finding a job that fits your skills and interests shouldn’t be too hard, and there are also plenty of opportunities to grow and move up the career ladder.
Are You Right for this Kind of Work?
Having the right degree or other qualifications is one thing, but it takes more than education to be the right fit for this kind of work. You will need to have great organization and time management skills, particularly when you will have high caseloads and many people to see each day. More importantly, you will need to be compassionate, as working with vulnerable people will require a certain level of sensitivity for you to be able to connect with those you are trying to help and allow them to feel heard. While compassion is key, you will also need to be able to work under pressure, and having a thick skin will be important in this line of work too, as there will be occasions where the scenarios you are dealing with will be very difficult.
Choosing a career in social work could be one of the best decisions you have ever made, but it isn’t without its challenges. Like anything, it’s important to carefully consider whether this is the right path for you before starting your career journey, and hopefully, this information will have helped you to start thinking about a social work career in more depth.