
Professionalism
Identify and behave as a professional social worker, committed to professional development.
Social workers are members of an internationally recognised profession, a title protected in UK law. Social workers demonstrate professional commitment by taking responsibility for their conduct, practice and learning, with support through supervision. As representatives of the social work profession they safeguard its reputation and are accountable to the professional regulator.
Practitioners at this level should:
- Be able to meet the requirements of the professional regulator.
- Promote the profession in a growing range of contexts.
- Take responsibility for obtaining regular, effective supervision from a social worker for effective practice, reflection and career development.
- Maintain professionalism in the face of more challenging circumstances.
- Manage workload independently, seeking support and suggesting solutions for workload difficulties.
- Maintain appropriate personal/professional boundaries in more challenging circumstances.
- Make skilled use of self as part of your interventions.
- Maintain awareness of own professional limitations and knowledge gaps. Establish a network of internal and external colleagues from whom to seek advice and expertise.
- Identify and act on learning needs for CPD, including through supervision.
- Routinely promote well-being at work.
- Raise and address issues of poor practice, internally through the organisation, and then independently if required.
Evidencing your capabilities:
At this level, this domain requires you to demonstrate that you are a responsible professional. Amongst other things, this means that you behave with integrity, you take responsibility for your own learning and development, you do not practice beyond your competence, you are proactive with your case work, and you promote the social work profession whenever you can.
Since this domain is mostly about how you behave, you are encouraged to explore your experiences with services users, colleagues, and other professionals. Where you have evidence in the form of feedback from others, this would be useful to reference. In addition, evidence relating to how you keep up to date with understanding social work in your particular area would be helpful, alongside suitably anonymised case notes.