Any Social Workers out there? What’s the job really like?

[Nicecuppatea2025]

Just that really.
I’m looking to switch careers (heading towards 50 soon!) and do something totally different.
Would love to hear from any social workers out there! What’s the job like?

What area are you thinking? Children's? Adults? Mental health?

Children / families I would think but open, and very keen to hear people’s experience in this general line of work.

It depends which area you want to work in. They all have different merits and drawbacks.

I’ve worked in children’s services. That meant a commute as personally I didn’t want to work in the same town that I practised in. It’s tough emotionally, trying to work with families who are hard to engage with. Going to remove children is never easy, however much you’ve thought about it and know the child is subjected to harm.

But when families do engage and make and maintain the changes needed it’s so positive.

I moved over to adults about 15 years ago and love it. Been with current team for 10 years. It’s in the adults learning disability team. Never a dull day, the clients are great, challenging, need a lot of input.

In both adults and children’s services there is a lot of paperwork, assessments, court work, visits, meetings, work with health professionals.

It can be long hours on top of travel but I honestly love what I do, can’t imagine doing anything else!

You need a lot of resilience! It can be great and good camaraderie with colleagues. But not for the faint hearted. And management and local authority systems an politics and chronic under funding/under staffing can really grind you down

Thanks for your replies!
Is it difficult to get a job? Also interested to understand how the training works & how long it takes. Assume I would need to fund my training?

I am not a social worker but I am a family support practitioner which has its differences, but similar line of work.And i've worked alongside social workers.

Its a tough field of work....you will see and hear some pretty heartbreaking things and it will question your faith in humanity on a regular basis as it does highlight the bad in the world.

I think for a social worker you would need to feel confident in challenging some incredibly hostile and intimidating individuals, be a straight talking, resiliant and confident individual who is also able to be sensitive and a good listener (for the children who are often in a very bad place) and very perceptive & observant.

I think the feeling of making a difference to families and protecting children is very rewarding when you can acheive it, but there would be some occasions where your hands will be tied to protect or make what you feel are the right decisions for children (eg; decisions made by a judge) and however hard you try sadly it will never be enough to bring about positive change, and you have to walk away living with that.

It's great you are considering it though....it is such an important and valuable job to do if you feel you have the skillset for it.

In terms of job availability, definitely not! Local authorities always have vacancies.

Traning is a three year degree. Then a year of Assessed Supported Year in Employment, ASYE. You’ll have further written work to complete and observations of your practice.

There is student loans and finance to apply for unless you’ve already got a degree and had student finance before.

There are degree apprenticeship's in social work now.

I work alongside children and families social workers- they fire the bullets and my staff team clean up the mess.
Honestly- as someone above said- it is a really tough job. Forget any ideas that you will change peoples lives, this rarely happens, you literally hold them up as they go from one trauma to the next. You hear and witness awful things and for me personally get really pissed off at all the failings in the system and seeing people be let down over and over.
Yes every day is different and I have had some moments of real joy seeing people achieve, but I have had many more moments of despair. You get used to it but you have to be incredibly resilient and have a stable home life yourself. If your own life is a shit show don’t do it.

and the MA which is a 2 year course

I started off thinking I would go into children and families but ended in in adult services, it’s still very busy and ridiculously over stretched but I think less pressured and stressful than child protection.

20 years later I left for a different career as I’d had enough, had enough of rubbish managers, had enough of endless tick boxes, had enough of constantly being pressured to take on more allocations when you’re full up, and the culture that if you’re not at breaking point with stress you’ve not got enough cases. And fed up of being the face of a complicated funding system and trying to explain that to people’s families. Oh and warring siblings making allegations and counter allegations of abuse.
Having to do onerous safeguarding investigations into incidents and accidents in care homes, eg every unwitnessed fall or pressure sore or a resident hitting another resident. When you know that the care homes are under staffed. And then trying to find care home placements for challenging people in an emergency, when private care homes are not obliged to take people in so why would they if they are going to lead to incidents and investigations! Ugh I could go on.
But the reactive nature of it, unrealistic expectations of staff and a broken social care system got me in the end.

Well i wouldn't have the stomach for it, I would crumble around intimidation and threatening behaviour.

But many years ago I was under adult services due to disability and having carers. I recovered when they thought I couldn't and had child services when I was pregnant just to check i was still ticking along nicely.
It was the adult social worker that transformed my life! She was my angel. She fought against all the professionals that were trying to put me in a home and say that I couldn't recover. She knew in her gut I guess that it was a misdiagnosis, she went against them and took a chance to support me independently. I dread to think what my life would be like now if it wasn't for her.
I now work in an amazing career, beautiful family, lovely home.
Children services were wonderful too, there wasn't much they needed to do, but they did build my confidence and just supported me to let go of my past and grow.

So although you would deal with awful tragic cases and very stressful moments. You could also completely change someone's life for the better and make their life wonderful.
There are different departments and it's not all tragedy. It's fighting for disabled children and families to get the health care they need, it's helping people access services, it's providing opportunities for children/families to grow. It's giving hope and support when they can't find it.

My sister is just finishing her training through Step Up to Social Work. There are a good mix of ages and backgrounds using this entry route. It's good because it is quicker, but my goodness, it is a brutal timescale. She doesn't have children or a big commute so is theoretically in a good position to cover the workload, but even then, it's been super tough. She is working in children's services, which she is really enjoying on the whole. There are obviously some things that keep her awake at night, but she seems to have a good team. The hours can be unexpectedly long, one night she was asked at lunchtime to drive 5 hours away to take a child to a placement and only got home at 2am for example. There do seem to be lots of different teams though, so potentially lots of roles within social work that are not as time demanding as child protection.
She just renewed her car insurance with her updated job, that was an unwelcome price hike too!