Article Review: Michael Emslie’s “Toward a Youth Work Profession”
For decades, youth workers across Australia and beyond have asked an important question: Is youth work a profession? In his seminal 2013 article, “Toward a Youth Work Profession”, academic and practitioner Michael Emslie argues that the answer is yes—if we’re willing to do the work from within the sector. Emslie explores the idea that professionalization […]
Youth workers need employment
Recently, a member of the Ultimate Youth Worker community and I had a great time of discussion after a misunderstanding. We spoke of how many in the community will be feeling the sting of the free market economy and austerity measures. That many youth workers are finding themselves out of work in the current political […]
A five step guide to self care
Guide to self care In my experience, “self care” in the Youth Work industry can be used as a “buzz word” or just a box to tick on your supervision notes. In my first year as a youth worker that was exactly how I thought. But after a while I began to experience mental health […]
What do we mean by professional youth work?
There has been a lot of talk over the past few decades about the need for professional youth work. The big issue here is we don’t really know what we mean when we say we need to professionalise! What do we mean by professional youth work?
ABCD and the youth work profession debate?
ABCD for Youth Work Much of 2016 was horrible for the profession of youth work. Our funding was cut… yet again, more of our colleagues lost their jobs and still more left because of burnout. Much of our discussion of the profession of youth work has focussed on what we don’t have and what we […]
future youth sector
Is this the future youth sector? There is a lot of talk in the youth sector which is splitting the camps into those wanting to go back to an age where we were well funded by government and able to do our own thing versus those wanting to collude with government and find a way […]
9 ways to keep great youth workers
How do you keep great youth workers? Youth work is one of the most difficult professions around. You tend to work with some very difficult clients who are generally not showing their best side. Managers know this, yet it still boggles my mind how often I have heard managers complaining about their lack of ability to keep great youth […]
We need to develop our youth work research base
Youth work research has come a long way over the past decade or so. We have gone from a profession that was grappling with how we used others knowledge in our practice to one that was seriously beginning to develop our own knowledge base. We have gone from having a few key researchers to a […]
Youth work needs to rid itself of its inferiority complex.
Over the years no other issue in youth work has bugged me more than the discussions about how we need to become more like other professions. For the most part it is a discussion about what we are not as youth workers. It says what we do not do. It says we are inferior to […]
Youth workers: write, do or do both.
The most well known youth workers world wide are often one of two types of people. They are either the academics who write something worth reading or they are the youth worker who does something spectacular that others write about. The academics are trying to write something that the youth worker on the ground can […]