The Status of Professional Practice Skills of Social Work Students in Vietnam

Nguyen Huu Long

doi:10.11648/j.ajap.20200903.14

Abstract

Social workers need to have certain skills to provide the best services for their clients. Therefore, assessing the status of professional practice skills of social work students in practice is a necessary task that can help managers of training institutions to have timely accurate information on the quality of training to change and adjust to improve the quality of training. On the other hand, the results of the research on practical skills of social work students will also help schools to review the connection and orientation between training institutions and the actual requirements of professional activities. This study aims to discover the status of professional practice skills of social work students in Vietnam. 174 students studying social work at the Colleges of Social Work in Thua Thien Hue, Soc Trang, Hanoi, and Ho Chi Minh City participated in the survey. A questionnaire and a situational judgement test are used to survey the performance of professional practice skills of social work students during their internship. The results of the study show that performance of professional practice skills of social work students during the internship initially is quite well. The professional practice skills performed best by students are the client access and assessment and self-test and self-assessment skills. The skills that students did not perform well are connecting resources and making support plans. Therefore, the academic subjects related to client support services should be paid more attention to in the training program. The author also recommends that training institutions strengthen exchanges between social work experts and students to help students improve their professional skills.

Highlights

Training to meet social requirements and international integration is a long-standing policy of the country's education
With the goal of fundamental and comprehensive innovation in higher education in Vietnam in the 2006-2020 period, it has clearly stated that higher education needs to apply advanced methods to develop training programs to meet social needs and international integration
The pair of skills are closely related such as skills of collecting and processing information with skills of self-test and selfevaluation, the correlation is 0.89. These results show that, in the process of professional practice skills, if one skill is well performed, other skills will have better performance results

Summary

Introduction

Training to meet social requirements and international integration is a long-standing policy of the country's education. A worrying fact is that Vietnamese higher education in general and the training disciplines according to the criteria of practice are increasingly failing or meeting very low requirements of employers. With the goal of fundamental and comprehensive innovation in higher education in Vietnam in the 2006-2020 period, it has clearly stated that higher education needs to apply advanced methods to develop training programs to meet social needs and international integration. Theoretical training should be associated with professional practice [1]. To this end, training institutions have been trying to innovate curriculum, teaching methods, and connect with related businesses to help students to form vocational skills timely. Professional practice is considered as the key task in training

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Conclusion