Clinical Social Worker Careers

Number of Jobs

39, 200

Median Salary

$50, 820

Unemployment Rate

4.2 percent

Not all health care is medical. There are also social aspects of medical problems, including how we prevent future medical problems, how we feel about a prognosis, how we judge the proper care we’ll need and how we cope with a stressful life change. A clinical social worker who concentrates on medical and public health issues largely deals with the social aspects of our health. He or she is an advocate for patients and can explain health care resources and policies, assist in finding additional treatment and offer guidance for how to cope with various psychosocial issues that may arise.

A clinical social worker’s day-to-day tasks could include ample research and mounds of paperwork, and they may diagnose and treat mental, behavioral and emotional disorders. Social workers undergo years of study, including an undergraduate program, advanced degree, approximately two years of supervised experience and a licensing exam before they can administer care.

Feeling empathy for people is an important asset in this business. A social worker’s purview could include improving the well-being of sick minors, evaluating a middle-aged cancer patient’s progress during treatment or assisting a senior citizen seeking home health care. Many of the medical social workers hired between now and 2022 will end up working with senior citizens and the elderly. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects a 26.8 percent employment spike by 2022, largely due to the comprehensive care the aging baby boomer generation will need. More than 39, 000 new jobs are projected.

Clinical social workers earned a median salary of , 820 in 2013, the BLS reports. The best-paid in the industry made , 140, while the lowest-paid earned , 790. The metropolitan areas that pay clinical social workers the best include Vallejo, California; Sherman, Texas; and San Francisco.

Training

Earning a bachelor’s degree in social work will allow a beginner to work as a case worker or mental health assistant. But all clinical social workers need to have a MSW – a master’s degree in social work – which they usually earn from a two-year program. Robert Booth, executive director of the American Board of Examiners in Clinical Social Work, encourages social workers to also study biology and chemistry. “You’ll be dealing with people who are using various kinds of drugs, both illegal recreational substances and then people who are on drug therapy, so having an awareness of chemistry is important, ” he says. “It’s also advisable to take a year or two of sociology to understand the systems of the culture.”

To become a licensed clinical social worker, you’ll have to acquire approximately 3, 000 hours or about two years of supervised clinical experience and pass an exam. Through this experience, you’ll need to learn how to comfort and communicate with people during an especially challenging moment in their lives. “A social worker must be compassionate, ” Booth says. “There’s no way around that. You can have all the intellectual skills, but without a reservoir of compassion for people in all sorts of conditions, this wouldn’t be the right sort of profession for you.”