Uplift, Defend, Transform: A Brief Overview of Social Work

Did you know that March is Social Work Month? First celebrated in 1963, it is meant to build public support for the profession and raise awareness of all the wonderful things that social workers do. Every year, the National Association of Social Workers (NASW), the main professional organization for the field, picks a theme for Social Work Month that represents the current climate. This year they have designated the theme as “Social Workers Uplift. Defend. Transform.” This captures the many different ways that social workers help people and improve their communities.

Qualification to be a Social Worker

What makes someone a social worker? Social worker is a professional title that designates anyone who has received a degree in the field. There are three levels of social work degrees: Bachelor of Social Work (BSW)/Bachelor of Arts in Social Work (BASW), Master of Social Work (MSW), and Doctor of Social Work (DSW). Social work education focuses on how different systems (social experiences, race and gender, laws, etc.) interact and how people can be helped or harmed by those systems. It also prioritizes learning by doing, as bachelor’s and master’s level students are required to complete practicum placements and connect their experiences in outside organizations to the concepts learned in the classroom.

Practicum placements can happen in all sorts of social service and related organizations. My BASW placement was with a public county library, and my MSW placement was a nonprofit that provides reading tutoring for kids. My peers had placements in cancer centers, elected officials’ offices, therapy organizations, public defenders’ offices, university departments, daycare centers, and more.

Licensure

Those who want to become licensed by the state as social workers must have at least an MSW and pass the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) exam. The license is referred to as either Licensed Social Worker (LSW) or Licensed Master Social Worker (LMSW). The only real difference between the titles is which one is used by the specific state in which you are licensed. To stay licensed, you must obtain a certain amount of Continuing Education units (CEUs) every year to show that you are making an effort to continue developing professionally. It is not a requirement of the field to obtain licensure, but many social work positions do require it to perform the work. As long as you have the MSW degree, you can take the ASWB exam and get a license regardless of how many years you have been out of school. This means, depending on the positions you are interested in, you could wait a while to be licensed or never end up pursuing it at all if you want.

The level of licensure above LSW/LMSW is Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW). LSWs who know they want to be mental health practitioners can take another exam and perform thousands of hours of supervised clinical practice to obtain this license. The LCSW is required to perform clinical work without oversight from a supervisor and to run your own private clinical practice.

Ethics

All social workers, regardless of degree level and presence of license, are professionally bound to the NASW Code of Ethics. The Code consists of six ethical principles and six sections of social workers’ obligations to individuals and groups. Social work syllabi in universities are created with the Code of Ethics in mind and often list the standards that the courses are emphasizing. You will see prompts in social work class assignments that ask you to connect the concepts back to the Code of Ethics. The Code is also built into the practicum experience, as reading the Code and thinking about how it connects to your placement is often one of your very first tasks.

How Do Social Workers Practice?

There are three general practice levels of social work: micro, mezzo, and macro. Micro is work with individuals, mezzo is work with groups, and macro is work with organizations and systems. Micro and mezzo are often grouped together under the label of clinical work, so it is common in social work circles to be asked whether you are a clinical or macro social worker. That’s not to say that clinicians don’t work on an organizational scale or that macro workers don’t work with individuals, it’s just a surface-level way to get an idea of the areas someone likes to focus on. Most social workers will find that they end up with responsibilities from all three levels of practice, regardless of what job they started out with.

Many go into social work with the intention of becoming mental health practitioners, but there are so many different roles one can perform with a social work background. Social workers become policymakers, create and run nonprofit organizations, work for government agencies, train other professionals, teach classes, work with specialized populations, open private practice therapy organizations, coordinate with other social services to help their clients, integrate into communities through places like libraries (like yours truly) and food pantries, and so much more. Of all the social workers I know, no two have the same job. Social workers are truly everywhere.

Library Resources Related to Social Work:

Since social work touches so many fields, almost anything that can be used to help people in some way can be considered a social work resource. Here are some of the databases available through the library that I think connect well with the field!

Foundation Directory: I used this site a ton in grad school, so I was excited to find I still have access to it through the library. The directory lists 501(c)(3) organizations and details like where they have received grants from, what subjects the organization focuses on (education, ending poverty, literacy, etc.), and their 990 forms. 990 forms are public-facing information about the money a nonprofit brings in and uses, and how that money is used. This information is especially useful in macro social work when you want to find grants for funding a program or find potential allied organizations who you can partner with to expand the scope of your work. It’s also useful on an individual level to vet charities before donating and find out if they spend their money in a way you are willing to support.

Health Source Nursing/Academic Edition: This database covers nursing and allied health topics, and social workers are included under the label of allied health. Just by searching “social work” in the database you can see all sort of cool articles about various aspects of social work, like the field’s grappling with AI, financial social work (a subfield I find quite interesting as someone whose favorite elective in grad school was Financial Management), research on burnout and compassion fatigue, arguments for and against social work involvement with police departments, and more.

Learning Express Library Complete: The ASWB exam is entirely multiple choice, so you can try out one of the practice tests from this database and see how you score. What is considered “passing” is different each time someone takes the exam, as the questions are randomized and exams considered to have harder questions require a slightly lower percentage of correct answers. As per the ASWB website, the minimum number of correct questions needed to pass is typically between 90 to 107 out of 150, depending on the exam. The questions on the practice test serve as a good overview of the values of the social work profession and what knowledge is considered essential.

Mango Languages: I believe that social workers (and really anyone) have an ethical responsibility to try to interact with as many different people and be exposed to as many different cultures as possible. A great way to do that is to pick up another language. You certainly don’t have to become fluent in a second language to be a social worker, but knowing some common phrases in your non-native language can go a long way in helping the people you work with feel seen.

ProCitizen: Even if you don’t personally know anyone who is preparing to become a naturalized citizen, it is a useful crash course on civics to go through the materials prepared for citizenship practice.

World Geography and Culture Online: In order to best help people who come from other places, it is important to have at least a baseline knowledge of where they come from. If you’re someone who likes to fall down Wikipedia rabbit holes, you’ll find the way this site organizes its information to be very similar, and easy to digest.

-Anthony, Information Technology/Social Work