At the beginning of this year, a news that "more than 2,000 people competed for 36 social work positions in county-level cities" sent the originally unpopular profession of social work to the hot search.
Data shows that in the past three years, the number of applicants for the social worker professional qualification examination has broken through new highs year after year, and the number of applicants in 2023 will exceed 1 million.
In the eyes of many people, entering the community and the street as a social worker in these years is a guaranteed choice. Although there is no establishment and the income is not high, it is better to be stable, there is no need to worry about being laid off, and more importantly, the threshold for entry is low, and the difficulty of obtaining the examination is much smaller than that of civil servants.
Xiao Li majored in social work in college, and after graduation, many of his classmates entered the community, streets, and elderly care institutions to work as social workers. Over the years, she has clearly seen how social work has changed from an unpopular industry that no one cares about to a hot bait.
What are the requirements for becoming a social worker? Which personality is more suitable for being a social worker? Is the real life of a social worker consistent with the rumored "five insurances and one housing fund, weekends and weekends, government work, decent and stable"?
The following are Xiao Li's observations and experiences.
The social worker finally came to his senses
"Ahhhh
On August 11 last year, the 2023 Social Worker Professional Qualification Examination was released, and the university dormitory group, which had been silent for a long time, was also lively. Xiao Jia excitedly posted the results to the group and shared the joy with us. After graduating, she entered a grassroots community in a city in the Pearl River Delta to do labor insurance and social welfare, and took a social work certificate after work. In her words, it is more convincing for community workers to be certified to work.
Like many vocational certificates, the social work certificate is also divided into three levels: "elementary, intermediate and high": students in this major do not need work experience to take the primary examination; after working for three years after obtaining the primary certificate, they can apply for the intermediate level; the senior qualification certificate will only start to organize the examination in 2018, and it takes 5 years for the intermediate level to be eligible to apply for the examination, with a pass rate of less than 20%, and there are currently more than 100 people who pass each province every year.
And our professional Xueba Qinqin is not a class. She explained, "It takes too much energy to take care of children, and there is more than enough energy to do it", so she can only fight again next year. Qinqin has a stable job in a public institution, and strictly speaking, there is no need for certification. But considering that she is from a professional class and affected by the "social work fever" in the past two years, she always feels that it is more reassuring to have a certificate in hand, "maybe it will be of any use in the future".
In the past two years, the social worker qualification examination has been hot. Swipe Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and WeChat public accounts every day, and jump out of the promotion of training institutions from time to time: Bao Ma has nothing to do to take a social worker certificate, five insurances and one housing fund, weekends and weekends, government work, decent and stable. According to the data, the number of applicants for the national social worker professional qualification examination in 2021 was about 830,000, which rose to 890,000 in 2022 and directly exceeded 1 million in 2023.
Social Work Professional Qualification Certificate | Image source network
Obtaining a social worker certificate has many advantages for applying for a social work position. In 2021, in the community recruitment examination in Baiyun District, Guangzhou, 1-2 points can be added to the written test with a social worker certificate, and in the 2022 community recruitment announcement in Jinhua, Yiwu, 3-5 points can be added with a certificate. Under the same conditions, those who hold a certificate will be given priority in the interview and admission.
The popularity of the social work qualification examination is essentially the popularity of social work positions. This year, I obviously feel that there are more and more professional returning social workers, and even the "Boss Luo", who runs a tutoring agency outside, has given up business and literature, and picked up textbooks to nibble on elementary courses. A few days ago, I was chatting with an old classmate who was doing new media, and she was also preparing to return to her old business after the company closed down and her boss ran away.
In the eyes of many people, being a social worker is a guaranteed choice these days. Although the income is not high, it is better to be stable, there is no need to worry about starvation, there is no fear of being laid off, and more importantly, it is much less difficult to get the exam than civil servants.
You know, when I graduated in 2018, anyone in the profession who could have other places to go would not consider becoming a social worker.
Unpopular majors, where is the road
Ten years ago, social work was a very niche profession, and many people had never heard of it.
My school is a little-known school in the Pearl River Delta. When I applied for volunteering at the end of the college entrance examination in 2014, no one at home helped me plan, and I didn't know what a social worker was.
I still remember that my mother asked me what social work was, and I couldn't explain it after thinking about it for a long time, so I had to follow Baidu's reading, "Make efforts in the fields of social welfare, social assistance, social charity, and disability rehabilitation...... It is a service purchased by the government, helping people to help themselves...... "I came to the school to know that social work is a new major opened in the past two years, and there are no graduates, and there are only 50 students in the whole major.
The courses of the social work major are actually quite interesting, there are basic courses such as sociology, social survey research methods, psychology, etc., as well as professional courses such as community work, professional ethics, and social work practice. During the lesson, the teacher will give us a lot of examples to help us perceive society in advance, understand the complexity of human nature, and how to deal with it.
Group assignment for social work professionals to treat depression with plants | Source: Interviewee
What I remember the most was that in an ethics class, when discussing how to deal with different recipients, the teacher mentioned "one floor and one phoenix" in Hong Kong. At that time, except for me and a classmate from another province, everyone in the class laughed tacitly. "One floor and one phoenix" refers to Hong Kong's semi-public prostitution, a residential building can only have one "phoenix" (that is, sex practitioners), Guangdong students have watched TVB since childhood, so they are very familiar with this folk culture. The teacher did not express discrimination against this group of people, but analyzed the background and living conditions of the sex practitioners, analyzed the helplessness of the underclass society in Hong Kong, and then explored how to help them from a professional perspective.
Looking at everyone and understanding everyone's hardships and hardships has also become my mentality when I face different groups of people after entering the society. It's just that at that time, social work had a very weak presence in the school, and I participated in fellow associations and various club activities.
Behind every activity is a professional theory support | Source: Interviewee
Four years later, when the graduation photo was taken, there were only 19 people in our class - some changed schools, some changed majors, and some became soldiers. The reasons for leaving vary, and the result was a shocking depression in the profession.
The profession is too unpopular, and employment is also a big problem. It is especially embarrassing when looking for a job, 9 out of 10 HR people don't know what this major does. Most of the brothers and sisters who graduated chose to change careers and became real estate agents, online writers, and corporate administrators, and few people did the right job, and I also went to a listed company in Shenzhen to find an administrative job.
Students who stay as social workers often have unsatisfactory salaries. Some of my classmates went to drug rehabilitation centers and procuratorates to work as judicial social workers, while others worked as education social workers in schools or rehabilitation social workers in nursing homes. But more people still go to the community and the street to work as social workers, which is the "neighborhood committee aunt" in the impression of ordinary people.
Social work agencies come to schools to preach| Source: Interviewee
After graduating, some students worked as social workers in a street town in Huizhou, with a salary of about 3,500. Next door to the street is Foxconn, and assembly line workers have a minimum salary of 6,000. A classmate said that after work, she went to a food stall near the Foxconn campus to buy things, and looked at the large group of workers who came out of Wuyang, and really couldn't tell the difference between herself and them.
The income is meager and the work is tedious
While the remuneration is meager, the work of social workers is tedious and endless.
My classmate Amin works as a social worker in a public nursing home in Shenzhen, where the aging population has intensified and nursing homes in first-tier cities have become overcrowded. Amin's nursing home has taken on a large number of needs, and more than a dozen social workers are responsible for the care of nearly 1,000 elderly people in the hospital.
Although nursing homes have dedicated nurses to provide physical care for the elderly, the task of social workers is not easy. Amin alone needs to take care of nearly 100 elderly people, mainly taking care of their spiritual needs: reminiscing about the past, making life memoirs, organizing the elderly to do handicrafts, raising plants, learning cards to prevent dementia, and holding family mutual aid meetings......
The average age of the elderly is seventy or eighty years old, many of them have varying degrees of cognitive impairment, advanced age disability, and some elderly people are seriously ill and abandoned by their families. On the first day of Amin's employment, she met a confused old man who said that she had stolen her things, and Amin was pointed at her nose and scolded for a long time, feeling aggrieved.
In nursing homes, life and death are commonplace. Amin worked for two years, and finally established a relationship with an old man, but she had to face parting again and again, she received a professional education, and she still couldn't accept it, and then she decisively went to the community, "Doing a pension (social worker), it is difficult to do without a strong heart." ”
In the consensus of everyone, social workers in the community do not have such high professional requirements, but they are complicated. However, my roommate Xiao Jia said that she would rather do some professional work than go to the scene every day like an "idler sister". She is an introvert and afraid to deal with people, but the leader advocates reaching out to the masses, "getting to know 10 residents a day", and "being familiar with the community to the point where you know whose dog it belongs to as soon as you see it."
Xiao Ying, a member of the study committee of our class, has been working in the community for 6 years since graduation. In 2017, the Guangdong Department of Civil Affairs launched the "Double Hundred Project" for people's livelihood services, and she was admitted to the first batch of examinations, and since then she has taken root at the grassroots level, engaged in rural social work, and is committed to "opening up the last meter of serving the people".
"Double Hundred Project" training
Xiaoying's community is a well-developed industrial village and town in the Pearl River Delta, with a large floating population and prosperous business in the jurisdiction, with a permanent population of 170,000 registered residents, but only 4 social workers. Lack of manpower is a common thing, they can only help the suffering, rescue, and emergency, and the groups they serve also focus on the most needy households with five guarantees, the disabled, and the homeless.
Even so, each social worker is assigned to more than 100 households. Xiaoying said that this is not bad, there are only a few key service personnel, and a social worker she knows has 500 people by herself, "just visiting the house has to go for half a year."
There are thousands of threads on the top, and a needle on the base. Providing psychological counseling, linking policies (i.e., providing information and resources so that recipients can enjoy benefits), visits, doing administrative materials, social worker training, and coping with exams in her spare time, Xiaoying's day is filled with countless chores, "I feel very busy every day, and I don't know what to do." She is also often seconded by the community to run errands at the window. Once, in time for the "Create a Civilized City" event, Xiaoying and her colleagues received a call at 9 p.m., asking everyone to sweep the road immediately and check it the next day. Sometimes, when teenagers are involved, she has to be called by the police station to be their temporary guardian and accompany them to record confessions.
After the storm, the social workers are sweeping the road | Source: Interviewee
Feelings and perseverance
In the past three years, the external environment has changed, and everyone has realized how valuable it is to have a stable job close to home. Many of my classmates began to rejoice that they were studying social work, after all, the job is in high demand, and the labor contract is signed for five years, and I have basically never heard of any institution closing down or employees being laid off, and many of my classmates have returned to the arms of social work agencies.
Xiaoxue is one of them. She is beautiful and has always wanted to be an actress. After graduating, she worked in the family comprehensive service center in her hometown of northern Guangdong, with few things, two days off, and a salary of about 3,000. The stable life lasted for a year or two, but she still couldn't let go of her dream of being an actress, quit her job again, and went north to become a drifter.
Because she can speak Cantonese, Xiaoxue was lucky to be selected by the Hong Kong crew as an actor with the group, and began to have a large number of lines and opportunities to show her face. Just when we all thought she was going to start making a name for herself in the entertainment industry, a few months later, she returned to Guangdong and wanted to find a new job as a social worker. According to her description, there are too few opportunities to get out of the group performance, she is not tall, her Mandarin is not standard, and the future is bleak.
In 2023, the State Council will set up a special department of social work, and there are special functional agencies from the State Council to the municipal level responsible for recruiting social workers and often organizing community examinations.
The threshold for social work is not high, but it is not easy to stay. Xiaoying said that one of her colleagues was originally a factory owner, who owed a lot of debt after the closure of the factory during the epidemic, and was admitted to the community in order to survive first, but he was never able to adapt to and be competent for this job;
In the face of some "imperfect" helpers, it may be difficult for social workers without professional education to adjust their mentality. When the epidemic was serious in 2022, Xiaoying and her partner met an elderly man in the jurisdiction asking for help, who claimed that he was abandoned by his family, penniless, and had no way to live, and asked the government to take care of him. Xiaoying helped contact the old man's family, but the old man's son was very resolute - when the old man was young, he drank and gambled, looked for a woman outside, abandoned his wife and children, and now he is old but wants to find a filial child to spend his old age in peace, and his son can't accept it anyway.
Xiaoying often encounters this kind of rescue object, she can follow the principle of "service object first" taught by the university professional course, persuade herself to help the elderly, but her partner is a temperamental, black and white, seeing such a thing, overreacting, just want to drive the old man away, and also post the old man's experience on social platforms, let others comment, in violation of professional standards.
People who can really persevere in the field of social work often have their own feelings and perseverance.
When Xiaoying first worked as a community support group for seriously ill families, no one wanted to come, and she herself was not confident, so she made up enough service hours by making door-to-door phone calls. But not long after that, an old mother in her 70s was willing to push her child out. Her son had a fever when he was a child, and he always got lost when he went out, and his wife entrusted the child to her before he died, in order to live up to his wife's explanation, she locked the child at home for many years, and she was depressed for many years, until she joined Xiaoying's group and heard her encouragement, she took this step.
Photo wall of the Social Work Centre | Source: Interviewee
Another time, when Xiaoying was visiting the homes of poor children, she stumbled upon a mother who had breast cancer. A single mother with a child, low income and serious illness are like two mountains weighing on her shoulders. Although she was very busy, Xiaoying still couldn't sit idly by, and finally took the initiative to increase her workload, linked policies for single mothers, and visited the Women's Federation to express condolences and contact reimbursement matters to help her reduce financial pressure.
Seeing the recent "social work fever", Xiaoying was relieved that her profession was finally seen. On the other hand, she is also worried that there are many people who enter this industry with the idea of stability, but in the end, there may be few people left.
After all, it is already very tiring to be alive, and I have to face the people at the lower level, and I can't change much of the status quo after seeing the heat and coldness of the world.