Social Work Profession: Workforce
- Tracy WhitakerTracy WhitakerDirector, Center for Workforce Studies & Social Work Practice, National Association of Social Workers
Summary
A profession’s ability to identify, predict, and sustain its workforce capacity depends largely upon its understanding of labor-market trends and emerging service-delivery systems. Concerns about the adequacy of the future supply of the social work workforce are being driven by a number of factors, including trends in social work education and demographic shifts in the country. The stability and continuity of a social work workforce depends on the profession’s ability to attract new workers, agencies’ abilities to retain their staffs, and the larger society’s investment in this pool of workers and the clients they serve.
