Towards soft skills framework for Social Work educators

Abstract

Social workers must be competence with their helping skills and need to be guided to acquire relevant soft skills. Hence, Social Work students need to have significant role models that they can look up to in order to become professionally and socially competent. Within the formal Social Work Education at the higher institutions, they can actually learn much from their lecturers or educators as their role models. This paper discusses conceptualizations of the soft skills which educators, currently as well as in the years to come, would need in order to sustain their competence as educators. In an exploratory study recently carried out, a Social Work expert was asked to describe the experiences of and viewpoints on, soft skills as part of the professional socialization of Social Work educators to become professionally and socially competent. It is important to raise awareness of soft skills competencies among Malaysian Social Work educators to help them in assessing themselves, and identify where and how they could actively improve themselves as educators within the context of their workplace. Embedding the soft skills competencies into their career as social workers is assumed as one of the effective and efficient method of achieving both professional and social competence. The propose soft skills, perhaps, provide early ideas and initiatives towards the construction of a 'soft skill-framework for Social Work educators', which can serve as guideline when facilitating and guiding future qualified social workers in Malaysia.