Starting to apply for graduate jobs is a challenging time for most undergraduates.  If you are not one of the lucky ones who decided at the age of seven that you wanted to be a doctor or a vet,  even deciding when to start can present all sorts of difficulties.  Even for those who know the direction they want to go in, it is not always obvious how best to go about it.  Will a graduate scheme be the only way to get a foot on your chosen career ladder?  Or should you start trying to find internship positions to gain experience and make contacts?
University careers centres can be very helpful with these kind of things, but turning up with no sense of what you want from your future, and asking them to wave a magic wand and come up with all the answers is unlikely to yield results.  These careers professionals are very well informed about the paths into most graduate careers, but are less likely to have a strong grasp of your skills, interests and background.  So it is probably not worth going to careers advisers until you have at least some idea of what they might be able to help you with, and the sector or field you are interested in.  This can be as vague as ‘media’, ‘health’ or ‘consultancy’, as the careers advisors will be able to tell you more about the different roles and graduate jobs that are available in each sector.

It is good to decide as early on as possible what the best route in your chosen career might be.  The reason for this is simple – applications for graduate schemes and internship positions can open as early as September in your final year of university.  For those who need to be interning in order to gain experience in their chosen area, it is often worthwhile to start applying for internships in your first year, so that you can gain experience in every university break.  Graduates considering law, journalism and advertising will thank themselves later if they have invested this time in gaining contacts and skills during their holidays.  Those interested in more corporate jobs such as accounting and finance will often find that a graduate scheme is the best way in, but your application to one of these is much more likely to be successful if you have completed an internship prior to your application.

Graduate jobs need not be a headache if you invest in a little bit of preparation.  Whether it is internship positions or a graduate scheme that will help you achieve your goals, all you need to do is decide what they are as soon as possible, and you should find yourself on a smooth path to success.

Please visit http://www.careerplayer.com/ for further information about this topic.

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Social worker jobs can put those who do them through higher than average stress and burnout.  As local authorities are forced to cut spending, increasingly high caseloads in a job with strong emotional demands are placing more pressure on our social workers than ever before.  Researchers in Calgary, Canada have attempted to discover the key to happiness for those in social services jobs, in the hope that policy makers will make use of their findings to make social worker jobs more attractive.  The study, by John Graham, a professor of social work at the University of Calgary, was interested in what makes these professionals happy, rather than concentrating on the well documented causes of stress.  His findings will be of interest to all those who want to make sure they keep hold of their valued employees.

He was motivated by trying to keep people in social services jobs, after recent statistics showed that eight percent of teachers and 15 per cent of social workers leave their jobs annually.  Graham’s team sent a survey to 2,500 registered social workers in Alberta, and received 700 replies.  They chose the 13 ‘happiest’ social workers of those who had replied and focussed their investigation on their lives, through job shadowing and in depth interviews.

They reported that the most satisfied social workers reported higher levels of fulfilment when they had flexible work schedules, work life balance and support in their jobs.  Graham highlighted that social workers, by their nature, are caring, sociable people.  When they experience high caseloads they need good support in order to do their jobs well.  One of the trends reported commonly by the happiest social workers was having a high degree of freedom built into their jobs, particularly having enough flexibility to balance the demands of heir jobs with their personal lives.

From victims of abuse to neglected children, people in social work jobs find themselves in a variety of challenging circumstances every day.  This makes social services jobs demanding, but also fulfilling, as long as social workers receive enough support.  These findings have interesting implications beyond the remit of social worker jobs, as other employers might be encouraged to look at what makes their employees happy rather than tackling what makes them stressed.  As the researchers point out, everyone performs better in their role when they can find satisfaction and happiness in what they do.  The best way to ensure your employees achieve this is to develop organizational cultures that reinforce these principles.

Please visit http://www.sanctuarypersonnel.com/ for further information about this topic.

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social work jobs are regularly much misunderstood, because social workers often appear in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. We all know that the media – tabloids especially – loves to tell a story of tragedy and depravity. But the old saying – when you do something right, people won’t know you’ve done anything at all – might well apply to social worker jobs. Well, at least in the sense that it is unlikely for there to be stories in the papers about what good things are being done to improve society by people in social services jobs: it is much more likely that they will focus on the one bad example that is not at all representative of social workers in general.

But the reality is that when a social worker does his or her job well – and the majority of them do, despite what the papers might say – it does get noticed. Not by the journalists, cameramen or news reporters, but by the service users that social work jobs are there for. It seems that amidst all of the scandalising of community jobs, especially in the public sector, most people have lost the idea of what social work really is, and what social services jobs actually do for the communities around the country.

A social worker is there for lots of different types of people – perhaps another reason why most people do not have a particularly clear idea of what a social or care worker does. But the common thread lies in the fact that a lot of people in this country – and indeed in every country – are in a state of crisis in one form or another. Social workers are there to help them out of their crises, and so the job of a social worker can be as varied as the crises of the people being helped.

A significant amount – just over half – of social services jobs are to do with supporting young people and their families. But there are many other categories of people that are assisted by people in social worker jobs. They include the elderly, drug addicts and alcohol abusers, people with learning disabilities or other mental health problems, and young offenders. social work jobs entail a range of activities. For instance, workers maintain regular contact with service users, in order to be able to advocate for them or to offer counselling support. They also write up assessments, often in partnership with medical staff to evaluate service users’ needs.

Please visit http://www.socialworkandcarejobs.com/ for further information about this topic.

http://www.socialworkandcarejobs.com/

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