Week 8 – Global Competency and Expectations

How does your host culture define “success” in a professional sense? What makes a successful/effective employee in your internship and industry? How do behaviors and actions of a “successful” employee differ in your host vs. home country?

I think success can be defined in a lot of different ways, depending on your career goals and your field of work. In many areas of study and work, someone’s value is decided by the numbers that they produce, like a grade or the cost of a sale, it can be seen clearly the ways that someone is moving up in the company or not. However, I think that social work/social care roles tend to be measured a bit differently. To be a successful/effective intern in my industry, you need to have a good amount of social and emotional competence that not everyone is naturally equipped with. In my field of work it is most important to be a level headed person and communicator and have a lot of humility. Open-mindedness and open communication tactics are what will help you achieve great production in my line of work.  

There is nothing black and white about this industry. There is not often a clear-cut answer to a problem or a situation and so you have to do a lot of readjusting. My coworkers and I have talked about the fact that humility is necessary in our line of work, and may just be the most important trait. Working with people in the community, multiple people who all come from a different background and with various perspectives can create an environment that is rich and wonderful, but also has a lot of varying perspectives. Nothing I do everyday is one size fits all, each person that I support has different preferences about activities they like, jobs they would do, ways they like to communicate, how they like to travel, etc. And I have to be aware of each of these preferences and try to meet them, even if they aren’t of any importance to me. This sort of interaction requires listening comprehension and attention to detail. I have to try and remember the certain ways that each service user prefers to be treated. The reliance on communication and getting to know someone is why I love the job, but it is also why it can be so difficult to manage and keep track of. When problem-solving situations arise is then humility becomes super important. In other jobs, seniority, authority, experience, and knowing the “right” way to do something are traits that outweigh others that may know less or be lower in the hierarchy of the job. But this is not the case in social work. A lot of the time, we have to be okay with swallowing our pride and allowing anyone on the team – despite status or experience – to add perspective to your problem. 

This kind of process and understanding is special to the field of social work and care. I think that many careers can be based in ego and be self serving. It is often a way to get people to succeed, by making a competition or task out of working, the idea of who can do better and achieve the greatest accolades. While this kind of attitude can foster a successful environment, it can also cause a toxic environment that focuses on one person’s knowledge and makes people too proud to ask for help. Pride can be the downfall of expansive knowledge. When people in important roles get too prideful, they will often also become close-minded. Sometimes when people believe that they know everything there is to know about something, and the way to do something, they begin to operate on auto-pilot. They assume that a solution that has succeeded once will be what is successful every time, and they never try to look at a situation in another light after that. It can be hard after this point to ever cause change or redirection. 

In social work, there needs to be constant change and re-evaluation, hence why pride cannot be a portion of our success, and instead humility has to be. In many roles opposite to this one, I assume that teams would not value the opinion of a young intern to the same level as they would an experienced officer. However, in social work all players feel a bit more on the same level as we attempt to use each other’s knowledge and perspective to attack a problem or achieve a goal. In my experience, both in the states and in Ireland, my opinion – despite my age or seniority – has been valued by my coworkers because each of us have different one-on-one time with our service users where we may be gaining more or less knowledge from them that needs to be shared. It is highly possible that I would be privy to information about one client that they did not tell anyone else. So long as that information isn’t confidential it is important that I share observations with my colleagues to enhance the experience that our service users are having. The more knowledge that all of us have about the people that we are working with, is helpful to improving all of the experiences that each person has. We are more successful when we are in tune to what is going on, and when we are humble observers and listeners.