The Capacity Building And Role Orientation For New Recruited Community Social Workers

With the development of community and the appearance of its importance, community and social work’s development is emphasized on by government. The community has increasingly become the master of social work’s professional service, which is opportunity and challenge to promote social work’s development. Especially for new recruited social workers, they work in the community related to their capacity and clear understanding of the role. What factors will promote and help them improve their professional quality and ability? In Chinese community settings, what kind of role social workers should bear? In this paper, the author discusses the new recruited community social workers’ capacity-building and positioning of the role start from the individuals, organizations and environmental aspects. In the paper, we use qualitative research method, collect data through interviews and semi participatory observation, and use the inductive method to analyze data.This paper first discusses the quality and capabilities that community social workers should possess, and on this basis to discuss the status quo of capacity-building for new recruited community social workers, then we find that some problems and obstacles exist in terms of training, supervision, social workers, policies and organizations. Thus, the writer raises several strategies and suggestions to promote the capacity-building of community social workers. They include:first is professional training, consist of training time, details, ways and subjects. Second is social worker’ personal aspect including good working attitude, correct understanding of themselves, continuing study and self-examination, to be an actor. Third is supervisor, they should train community social workers about the professional values and ethics, community work models, skills and methods, should realize social workers’ needs, promote communication between different communities. Moreover, social work service agencies should actively promote the supervision’talent team construction. Forth, the community residents committee should be more inclusive to offer social workers more breathe space. Fifth, government should implement and improve the welfare level of social workers, promote the fulfillment of their social values and personal values.Then writer discusses the role orientation of new recruited community social workers. Community social workers consider that they should bear coordinator, organizer, communicator, supporter, healer, mentor, educator, enabler, advocate, who launched, influencer, implementer, service provider, leader, resource provider, policy consultant, experts and other roles. Among these roles, they think "service provider, organizer, communicator, and implementer" are easy to achieve. Most of the new recruited community social workers are confusion about their role orientation, existing contradictions and conflicts between professional roles and administrative management role. Through analyzing their work status, writer concludes that there are three factors result in the hardness of role orientation. Thus, writer comes up with some suggestions in terms of role’s integration; standard and professional adhere, to promote new recruited community social workers more correct role orientation.