10 Skills Needed for Social Work

Written Originally for the publisher Wiley’s client: socialworkdegrees.org

To develop the social work skills necessary to succeed as a social worker, such as organizational skills, active listening skills, and advocacy skills, getting a degree in social work is the best path forward. 

The strengths of a social worker rest in their ability to use critical thinking, empathy, patience, and boundary-setting skills to help clients resolve their problems without incurring any damage themselves in the process. 

Here are the top 10 social work skills needed for social work professionalism, expertise, and overall career success: 

Empathy Skills 

Empathy is the ability to understand the mental states others are currently occupying, whether or not they are fully aware of it themselves. 

For instance, sometimes, we know when our friend is angry before they know –and our knowledge of this often elicits our friend’s self-consciousness of being angry. 

Empathy is essential for social workers because without understanding other people, you cannot help other people. Since helping others is the sole job descriptor of social work, empathy is indispensable to the profession. 

Organization Skills

Social workers typically have a high workload. Mental health social workers, for example, speak with dozens of clients each week back-to-back. 

Or, consider being a community social worker who is responsible for organizing events comprising dozens of people: organization skills are tools and tricks one can use to manage high workloads and situations involving high numbers of people. 

One such tool includes scheduling your days in advance minute-by-minute through Google Calendar so you know exactly what to expect on any given workday at specific times each day. 

The best way to maintain a high level of organization is to intentionally minimize trivialities and distractions –both of which are typically characteristic of surprises, which are mitigated through such a rigorous scheduling process. 

Listening Skills 

Listening and empathy skills go hand-in-hand, as without listening to others, how can one be empathetic toward them? 

Listening skills, however, go beyond simply hearing the utterances of others and understanding what they mean –that is not a skill but something that occurs when you pay attention to what other people say. 

Rather, listening skills must also involve how one listens to another –that is, how it makes other people feel. Does your client feel like they are being listened to? If not, even if you were indeed listening, that is a setback in progress for the client. 

Communication Skills 

Knowing others and how to listen to them requires a general sense of communication skills –how to talk to others and, most importantly, how to talk to others whose life experiences differ considerably from that of one’s own. 

Being able to understand body language and the context under which one is engaging with particular clients –e.g., court-ordered versus voluntary– will help you gauge your own tone of voice and body language to accommodate for those differences. 

Critical Thinking Skills 

Critical thinking –the active application of our reason toward some end goal– is needed to make such communicative judgments. 

We cannot assume we know another person’s background in full and should consider withholding certain statements based on our assumptions on matters we lack the entire picture of. 

Critical thinking is also required to know how to choose your battles –when, for instance, to call out a client’s manipulative behavior and when not to. 

These decisions aren’t going to be made by being impartial to the facts at hand but instead by paying close attention to them and critically analyzing them. 

Advocacy Skills 

Community leaders must stand up for communities, and what it is to stand up for a community and its individuals is, by definition, advocacy. 

The sole job descriptor of a social worker is being an advocate for humanity –especially those humans who are one’s clients or community members. 

Knowing not only how to organize people spatially into groups, but to know how to make them come together as a community, one needs to be an advocate on their behalf. 

Patience Skills

The nature of social work involves helping others with highly untrivial problems. Some clients who seek social work are stubborn –and are at least in part seeking a social worker to become less stubborn. 

Progress in social work is not always going to be linear, and if one is not careful, the impatience that ensues from this fact can be damaging for social workers and clients alike. 

Self-Awareness Skills 

In order to be patient, one needs to be self-aware. 

Mindfulness to the on-goings of one’s own mind can be challenging in the whirlwind of modern life –distractions are ever-present. 

However, becoming controlled by these distractions can lead to occupational hazards, such as social workers losing their patience with clients and either giving up on them or providing them with substandard treatment out of careless self-opacity. 

Boundary-Setting Skills 

Social workers often work with violent and manipulative individuals who are not afraid to direct their negative behaviors and tendencies onto clinicians. Social work skills exist that are purely for self-protective purposes. 

Learning how to set boundaries –including explicitly making them clear from the beginning of a clinical relationship with a client– is therefore critical not only to successfully fulfilling the tasks required of social workers but doing so in a manner that keeps social workers safe. 

Socio-Economic Knowledge Skills 

The strengths of a social worker, at least in part, come from their ability to be resourceful and knowledgeable individuals embedded within a community or organization to use these abilities to aid community and client growth. 

Therefore, as an extension of this ability, it is obligatory that social workers have a good understanding of people from socio-economic backgrounds from all strata of society. 

Suppose social workers lack this kind of knowledge or the ability to absorb it swiftly. In that case, they will be incapable of serving certain communities, including those most disaffected and who need the help of social workers.