As you work to complete your masters in social work online and you start to think about your future career, you may be wondering what skills will serve you best as a social worker. Well there are a number that can really help you and ensure that your career is successful and rewarding. Obviously, you won’t have all of them, but some are skills you can learn and perfect along the way.
A Great Listener
One of the top skills you can possess as a social worker is to be a great listener. This is a skill that you can work on as a student and really start to perfect. It’s also a skill you can continue to work on throughout your entire career. It makes for a great life skill in general. Not only do you need to be able to listen, you need to be able to absorb what is being said and catch all the key things as they are said. This will allow you to offer the correct kind of support for that person, and it will also build trust since they know you are hearing them and making them feel important.
Excellent Critical Thinking
Critical thinking is another skill that you can work on and really perfect through the years. What this means is that you can listen to a problem and come up with a solution for that unique problem. People often refer to it as “thinking on your feet” because you need to be able to go with the flow and with the situation that is presented to you.
Highly Organized and Detailed
Another top skill for social workers is that they need to be highly organized and detailed. They will be responsible for plenty of note-taking during their time at work, so not only do they need to listen they need to make detailed notes at the same time. These notes have to be well organized and easy to understand so you can go back to them and use them to create strategies and solutions.
A High Sense of Empathy
As a social worker, you will hear all kinds of stories and you need to show a high level of empathy and understanding towards people. You need to be able to put yourselves in their shoes and see the problems through their eyes so you can truly understand and help. This also means that unfortunately it can be a very emotional career to take on, and often those emotions are hard to leave at the office.
Excelling in Your Career
This is just a small look at a few of the skills required to be a successful social worker. Possessing some or even all of the skills mentioned above will help to ensure that you get the most out of your chosen career path. And not to worry, even if you don’t have all of them you can spend time working on them as you work to complete your masters of social work online.
This post was written by Bill Clark. Bill is a freelance journalist who specialises in writing about culture and the arts, however will write about anything that piques his interest including business, travel and lifestyle. He can be reached on Twitter @BilboClark01.