Reconciling your personal and professional values
Learning Objectives
After considering this resource, you should be more aware of the interplay between personal, professional and organisational values and how you can resolve what to do when faced with value-based dilemmas.
Social work can be characterised by the dilemmas surrounding your personal and professional value base that you will inevitably be faced with at one time or another. This article by Mark Doel considers the relationships between personal, professional and organisational values using a number of different contexts, including the significance of personal qualities and attributes the professional role encompasses. Moreover, the piece provides value-based dilemmas for you to consider and helps guide you through the landscape to reach a reasoned judgement
Reflective Questions
- Consider the integrity model and the professional model. To which do you subscribe to? What are the reasons for this?
- Do you think you should be expected to behave professionally at all times, not just on the job? Why? Why not?
- What judgements did you draw from practice example 3? What were the reasons for those conclusions? Did you do the exercise with a colleague, fellow student or supervisor? Did they reach the same judgements as you? In what ways did they differ?
- From the list of twenty attributes provided in the article, pick a quality that you listed as reflecting you the most and carry out a similar exercise to the exploration of assertiveness. What can you draw from this exercise?