is that almost is not good enough.
I will hand my final essay in on July 25. Assuming I pass this final piece of assessment, I will be eligible to graduate. Although the graduation ceremony won’t be until December, I am able to get a letter from my university stating that, yes, I will graduate and, yes, i am able to practice as a qualified social worker. I’m thinking all of this will happen by about mid-August if I’m lucky.
The thing is, potential employers don’t seem to want to bother with me while I am almost-qualified. I know that this is because they want me to be eligible for registration with the AASW (Australian Association of Social Work), but surely with a month to go, they can trust that i will get through my degree? It takes a while for the recruitment process anyway, doesn’t it?
My first placement was at an agency that offered home nursing services to the elderly. After that, I managed to get a job at one of Australia’s biggest blindness organisations where I stayed for 6 months as a Case Manager. I know 6 months isn’t a long time, but I feel it gave me a really good practical understanding of Social work. I had my own case-load and was doing the work of a qualified social worker (intakes, assessments, individual service plans, community education presentations etc), even though they accepted me knowing my qualification was not complete. So, I have a little bit of practical experience, but not a great deal in the grand scheme of things, I guess. But shouldn’t it count for something?
I have been applying everywhere. I am willing to move out of my town, out of my state, but no one is interested. On top of that, I am sort of feeling limited in what I can apply for. There are a lot of jobs out there that request applicants have a drivers license I can understand this if the jobs involve a lot of outreach and home visits, but some of the centre based job ads say its required too. With low vision, I can’t hold a drivers license, but i can access public transport and taxi’s. Now in my last job at the blindness agency, I was able to get a book of cab charges from the agency and use that to pay for taxi’s when i needed to go out into the community for presentations and the odd home visit that I needed to conduct. If agencies are able to offer social workers cars to use, why can’t they offer me a book of cab-charges as a compromise?
I’m not asking for the world…just a chance.
I guess I am just frustrated. I want a job to go to and everything I do to try and get one just doesn’t work. Sometimes I feel like my only option is to try and get back into this blindness organisation that I worked in, but that would just be the easy way out. I want to try and get work in a hospital, or in a women’s centre, or something…
Anyway, rant over. Thanks all for reading. This is not what I wanted my first post to be like but I really needed to get this off my chest. I’ve been submitting application after application, and I think it’s all starting to take a toll on my mental health. Venting was needed!
Best of luck to you on your employment search. I just posted a postive story on my blog. Maybe it can be helpful for you
Thanks for sharing. Look forward to following your journey and keeping fingers crossed for you!
[...] post is actually from last week but I am including it because it’s a new blog I found from a Social Work Student (about to qualify) from Australia who is writing about some of the challenges of finding a job – it certainly seems that some [...]