Social Worker job description
108 verified openings in Social Worker
When a child stops showing up to school, a social worker is often the person sent to find out why. BLS counts social workers in several series; this page quotes the largest of them, child, family, and school social workers, 392,550 jobs aimed at the social and psychological functioning of children and the well-being of their families. The work spans arranging adoptions and foster homes, addressing truancy and misbehavior in schools, and advising the parents and teachers around a struggling child. The May 2025 median for the series was $59,550, and eight of every ten social workers in it earned between $42,280 and $95,530.
Core Duties and Responsibilities
Case files anchor everything else: histories maintained and reports prepared, before and after every intervention. Interviews with clients, alone, with family, or in groups, establish what services a situation calls for, and from there the social worker becomes the connection among students, homes, schools, courts, doctors, and protective services. Service plans are developed with clients and followed up for quality. Legal duties are real, assisting at hearings and giving testimony that informs custody arrangements, and so is practical help: referrals to job placement, debt counseling, legal aid, housing, or financial assistance, with concrete directions on where to go and how to apply. Placing children in foster or adoptive homes, and evaluating the applicants who offer them, runs through the caseload.
Common Skills and Technologies
Everything routes through listening, with speaking, critical thinking, and social perceptiveness rated close behind, and persuasion makes the cut as well, since getting a parent, a school, or an agency to act is part of the job. The software employers request by name is ordinary office tooling, Microsoft Access, Excel, Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint, though O*NET's technology categories for the occupation extend to database query and medical software.
Education, Training, and Career Path
Preparation runs at Job Zone 4 level: a four-year degree plus considerable experience. On the credential the job demands at the door, 69 percent of survey answers named a bachelor's degree, 26 percent a master's, and 6 percent an associate degree. Job titles track the setting: child protective services, school, foster care, and adoption social workers all belong to this occupation.
Sources: O*NET 30.0, 21-1021.00 Child, Family, and School Social Workers, https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/21-1021.00. BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, 21-1021, https://www.bls.gov/oes/tables.htm.