Being a social worker is an immensely rewarding and gratifying profession, though, like any role, it comes with challenges, too.
Social workers take a person-centred approach, helping individuals (and families) extricate themselves from abusive situations or to live more independently.
In this post, we’re going to be exploring the various benefits and drawbacks to a career as a social worker. So, let’s look at the pros first.
Pros of Being a Social Worker
Getting to Make a Meaningful Difference in People’s Lives
Undoubtedly, the main benefit of being a social worker, and the main reason most people get into the work in the first place, is to make a genuinely tangible difference in the lives of some of the most vulnerable people out there.
From child protection (CP) services to healthcare and hospital social workers, social workers get to make an impact – that is, a true impact – and how many professions can say they get to do that?
Helping the people most in need access the support and resources they need when they can’t otherwise access them is an incredibly worthy thing to do, and it’s fair to say that social workers do the work they do for the love of supporting others.
Salary/Earning Potential
Social work can bring attractive salaries, whether on an annual permanent basis or an hourly rate.
Salaries for social workers can be upwards of £45,000 depending on experience and location, with hourly rates of between £35 and £40 per hour not uncommon for contract and temporary positions.
No Two Days Are the Same
If you’re looking for a role in which variety reigns supreme, you can do much worse than looking toward a career in social work. Social workers, whichever sector they work in, have a wide variety of tasks, which means that days are rarely dull.
Daily responsibilities of a social worker include client meetings, care assessments, team meetings, reporting and documentation, crisis intervention, resource coordination and advocacy, and much more.
In the span of a week, a social worker might help a teenager find mental health support, assist an elderly client with housing needs, and advocate for a child in the foster care system.
This diversity not only keeps the job interesting but also continuously develops a social worker’s skill set. You know what they say – variety is the spice of life!
Cons of Being a Social Worker
A Lot Depends on Your Employer
Much like any job in which you’re working with other people, whether or not you have a rewarding experience as a social worker often depends on your team and your employer.
If you work with an employer that forgets the core tenets and values of social work – that feeling that they’ve lost touch with those values – then that can hurt the overall social worker experience.
Negative Stigma Around the Profession
Sadly, social work has traditionally been accompanied by a fair amount of (wholly unfair) negative stigma, especially in the CP branch of the field.
Social workers are only ever trying to help people they’ve deemed to be in a vulnerable setting. However, this can be seen as intruding or ‘meddling’ by the people surrounding the vulnerable party in question (a child’s parents, for example).
Fortunately, though, most of the population does recognise the valuable role that social workers play, with 88% agreeing that social workers are important in helping vulnerable people. Similarly, 74% of people feel the value of social workers isn’t fully appreciated.
This shows that, although the stigma might be loud in some corners of society, most people genuinely appreciate the work that social workers do daily.
Emotionally Demanding
A career as a social worker is unquestionably highly emotionally demanding. As a social worker, you get to see people move on to much brighter futures.
However, you also see tremendous amounts of pain in your day-to-day role, too. Seeing vulnerable people in distressing situations takes it out of professionals who are, by their very nature, highly compassionate.
Social workers must find methods and (healthy, adaptive) coping strategies to deal with these emotional demands to avoid the risk of burnout or compassion fatigue.
You can’t fill from an empty cup, and when it comes to social workers? Well, they do a lot of pouring. Keeping boundaries and practising self-care will help ensure the cup stays as filled as possible.
What makes it so demanding, though, is ultimately also what makes it so rewarding.
With so much compassion involved – yes, you ride the low lows as a social worker, but you also get to experience those incredible highs when you do the job to the best of your ability and help protect or support a vulnerable person.
Underfunded Sector
Social workers have experienced cuts to funding over the past decade, meaning that the same quality and quantity of work must be delivered with fewer resources.
Understandably, this has placed stress on the social worker workforce. Hopefully, the care sector will receive greater funding moving forward, and the strain placed on social workers will be lessened.
Final Thoughts
So, there you have it! Our guide to the pros and cons of being a social worker.
If this article has shown you anything, it’s hopefully that whilst there are undeniably challenging aspects to being a social worker, like the emotional demands, lack of funding and stigma, these can either be accounted for (in the case of setting boundaries to avoid burnout), or may change in the future/are already changing (in the case of funding issues and stigma surrounding the profession, respectively).
If you’d like to learn more about our well-paying social worker jobs, don’t hesitate to get in touch – we can’t wait to hear from you! 🚀
