A social work practicum is the only social welfare course that provides field experience and it helps students majoring in social welfare to establish professional identity as a social worker. It also provides a professional training to learn necessar...
A social work practicum is the only social welfare course that provides field experience and it helps students majoring in social welfare to establish professional identity as a social worker. It also provides a professional training to learn necessary qualifications and practical skills needed at the scene. Therefore the study was designed to compare the effects of social work practicum on career decision-making capacity of the students before and after the exposure so that we can improve the efficacy of the experience.
Brief summary of the study tells us that satisfaction level of choosing majors, parents' satisfaction of finding a job in the field of social welfare, volunteer works, work experience of supervisors and the supervisions they give, and satisfaction of the organizations are the major factors with positive effects on making career decisions.
In other words, the more students and parents are satisfied with their majors and finding a job in social welfare field respectively, the level of making decisions for their career improved.
Also, more experienced the supervisors are and more support from them improved the level of career decision-making capacity of the students. Especially, after experiencing social work practicum, there was an increase in volunteer participation.
Based on the results of the study, I would like to make the following suggestions.
First of all, every training organization needs to have a systematically standardized establishment for training terms, number of training, and timing of the training so that students from different organizations would not feel the difference.
Second, we need to develop programs that may provide continuous experience in different fields that social work practicum lacked through constant volunteer works.
Third, it is essential to provide supervisors with organizational support and appropriate training opportunities to improve their expertise so that supervisors may offer adequate instructions to the students. Also, supervisors need to realize the importance of their role and enhance their capabilities.
Fourth, schools, training organizations, current social workers, and supervisors need to cooperate to develop a practical program so that volunteering students can learn various and well balanced knowledge about social welfare area. This program is to provide consultations about students’ future career plans as well.
Fifth, each organization and school need to recognize the importance of the curriculum of the social work practicum. It is necessary for the social worker association and each organization along with other schools to get involved politically to support, expand and improve the curriculum.
This study is significant for being the first study to compare the effects of social work practicum on career decision-making ability of the students before and after the experiential exposure. It is also significant for finding the factors that influence the decision-making and the correlation between the before and after the exposure.