Social work students’ professional socialisation in China: experiences and challenges

Abstract

ABSTRACT Professional socialisation refers to the process that a student becomes a professional. Adopting this notion, the current study investigated social work students’ experiences in China, where a great proportion of graduates decided not to become social workers. The data were collected from student focus groups from six universities across BSW, MSW and MA programmes in China. Based on a professional socialisation conceptual framework, the findings showed that students’ professional development was hindered by limited pre-socialisation, insufficient content and structure support in programme training, and anticipated unmet career expectations. Implications for social work educators to address these challenges were discussed.