CONTINUING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL WORKERS IN PRACTICE: AN EXPLORATIVE INVESTIGATION
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15270/46-3-161Abstract
The paper starts with a brief autobiographical reflective narration of my own experience as asocial worker. The purpose is to demonstrate and contextualise the interaction, change and
inherent ambivalences in relation to my own experience of post-qualifying learning. I qualified
as a social worker in 1978. My first employment was with the Department of Social Welfare
(Coloured Affairs) in the Western Cape. During the first week of my induction I was
introduced to two important people, my supervisor and the “In-service training manager”
(ISTM). My supervisor was responsible for supervising my day to day workload. The ISTM
was exclusively responsible for guiding and testing me on the content of a thick lever-arch file
called the in-service training manual. The latter contained all the relevant legislation, policies
and departmental procedures that I had to study and know before becoming a permanently
employed social worker and public servant. Every Friday I would religiously go to the inservice
training guru to be tested on the contents of the file. The ISTM was also kept informed
by my supervisor about my performance on the job and would comment on my progress as
indicated by my “stats”. The latter was a record of how many clients I had seen and what the
results achieved on each of these were. This process would continue until the in-service
training was satisfactorily completed.
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