As a social services assistant, you help healthcare workers, social workers, and other related professionals provide services to people who need them the most. You can specialize in one particular area, such as in community outreach, mental health, or in social work helping families manage their lives. You may also act as an aide to those who work in various types of therapy, such as physical therapy, rehabilitative therapy, or mental health services.
For each of these fields, of course, you need specialized training, but you may not need much formal education. It is true that because competition is increasing employers increasingly look for people who have some education beyond high school. Certifications in the field you wish to work in or an associate’s degrees in areas like psychology or gerontology, or in fields like counseling will certainly increase your ability to get one of these jobs easier. In some cases, you may need a formal bachelor’s degree in these fields, although often this happens after you have been on a job for a while and need such a degree for advancement rather than to get an initial entry-level aide job.
Reasons to Get a Job in Social Services
These types of jobs deal one-on-one with people in their most vulnerable states. In some cases, they are in crisis and will need your help because they are in dire circumstances. These positions are ideal for people who have as their main goal to help people make better lives for themselves. In fact, this often must be your driving motivation, since many of these jobs pay relatively modestly.
Skills Necessary for a Social Services Job
- Patience—patience is more than a virtue in these jobs, especially because many of the people you work with may either be in trouble or have physical, psychological, or social disabilities or other difficulties in managing everyday life. Therefore, being patient and encouraging with people in these situations helps them manage their own problems much more easily. Because they look to you as a resource and guide, you must be that resource by not only providing the services they need, but also by providing them the encouragement needed to make the changes necessary.
- Attention to detail and organization—because many of the people you work with are going to be working on their own organizational skills and day-to-day management skills, being organized yourself makes you a good role model for those you work with as they learn these skills. In addition, though, you will simply need to be organized because it is likely that you will be helping your direct supervisor manage case files and other personal client information. Because of this, you will have a lot of paperwork to shuffle, and you will need to be organized so that you can handle your cases adequately and properly.
- Physical and emotional stamina—social service jobs can be quite stressful, especially if the clients you work with are under a lot of stress themselves. In addition, these jobs can be physically taxing, too, especially if you will be serving clients in need of physical assistance (such as the physically disabled) or if you will be working in harsh conditions (such as some caseworkers do with the homeless).
Once you have graduated from high school, if this is an area you want to get into, you may want to begin to volunteer at places like your local homeless shelter. Once you graduate, you can usually begin working right away with some on-the-job training; in some cases, you may need to get additional certification or an associate’s degree beyond your high school diploma in the area you wish to focus on.
Once you have gotten your certification as necessary, you can look for work at local employment agencies or online. In many cases, you do not need a resume and can simply fill out an application. However, if you do need a resume, it should briefly detail your educational history and then focus on any work history you have in this area. Emphasize the skills you have which you can bring to the job such as an ability to work with people and help them find solutions to their problems.
You can also look online to find jobs in your particular area of expertise. In this case, your resume should contain keywords that will make it easy for employers to find you online. Emphasize your key job focus with keywords and keyword phrases such as “human services aide” or “social services aide.”
Compensation and Outlook
Those who work as aides to people like social workers or healthcare workers like physical or rehabilitative therapists have an excellent job outlook, although compensation for these positions is somewhat modest. There is an increasing need for aides in fields such as social services and human services because this is an area that deals with everything from the homeless to the mentally or physically disabled, to those who abuse drugs. All of these areas continue to grow in both need and scope.
As social services organizations look to cost-cutting measures in the near future, more and more responsibility is going to be shifted to assistants or aides so that fewer social workers and other higher-paid staff need to be hired.
Many people begin their careers as aides or assistants while they are in school, and then continue on into a full-fledged supervisory capacity such as advancing from being a social services aide to a social services caseworker once one has completed a degree. These types of jobs are going to be much more scarce than those at the assistantship level, though.
In general, assistants in these fields made about $25,000 on average across all specialties as of 2006.
