Becoming a social worker: Educational implications from preliminary findings of a longitudinal study

A central issue for the social work profession is to delineate the stages involved in the process of how social work students become competent practising professionals. This paper presents preliminary results of a yet to be completed five-year longitudinal study designed to explore this process in detail. At this stage the participants have just completed two years of social work education and are now practising as beginning social workers. The main purpose of the paper is to report briefly on the preliminary findings of the study to date, and their implications for the social work curriculum. A more comprehensive report on the preliminary findings of the study is documented elsewhere (Ryan, Fook and Hawkins, in press).