What would you learn to improve your work in child protection? Social workers’ continuing education requests

Continuing Professional Development: Standards And Practices In European Associations Of Social Work

“…Old and recent literature in the field of CPD in social work (Congress, 2012;Cabiati, 2017;Smith & Loya, 2020;Terziev, 2017) recommend professional organizations to build a constant system for research, identification and monitoring the needs of continuing education of social workers in compliance 1027 to the requirements of the labour market and to the social needs of the vulnerable groups they assist and care.…”

“…Not only professional standards but also recent studies (Gray, 2020;Hudson et al, 2020;Mueller & King, 2018;Rentea et al, 2021) show that it is almost vital for social workers to continually improve 1025 their knowledge and skills and to be lifelong learners, the positive impact (Gray, 2020) being immediately visible in improvement of self-esteem and confidence which, in turn, are the main motivators for accessing new CPD activities (Cabiati, 2017). There are though many challenges faced by social workers in accessing CPD: the pressure of time needed for the accumulation of mandatory credit points for maintaining the registration, the inflexibility of their employers regarding the allocation of time for participation in CPD activities, long distances travels (Rees et al, 2018) till the location of the learning activities, the lack of the necessary funds required to participate to different credited activities offered by professional membership organizations in social work field, personal challenges and, in many cases, inability and discomfort in interacting with information technologies.…”