Teaching note: encounter with paradoxes: students’ internal experience in social work retraining programs in Israel

This teaching note describes the transformative journey of students in social work retraining programs in Israel, highlighting the unique internal challenges they encounter in forming a new professional identity. The retraining programs attract individuals from diverse professional backgrounds seeking to transition into social work, a process fraught with internal contradictions and identity conflicts due to their previous careers and personal life experiences. The retraining process undermines the students' existing identity, which, together with the fact that they are older and have more life experience than undergraduate students, leads to different paradoxical experiences. The tension between former theoretical and new practical knowledge, the struggle between old personal habits and the new profession's ethical and behavioral demands, and the adjustment from previous autonomy to the supervised learning environment lead to this internal paradoxical experience.