The ideal new employee

Tim Agg

Abstract: This article was adapted from an address given to a class in the social service worker program, Langara Campus, Vancouver Community College, March 3, 1993. The author offers some thoughts about what to look for in hiring, from a somewhat different perspective than readers may be used to.

Youth services in British Columbia are provided primarily through the nonprofit sector. Services are dependent on government policy and on government contracting arrangements, which have created a rather competitive environment in recent years. Neither programs nor agencies are assured of much security. The ability of an agency to survive, let alone thrive, requires skills that we formerly did not think were very important.

What does that mean? What does an agency like ours look for in prospective employees? What kinds of training, knowledge, and skill are desirable?

Our employees should like kids: like spending lots of time with kids, like getting to know them, like befriending them. They cannot work effectively with kids and remain detached. Those who are not comfortable being with kids a lot should not look to PLEA (the Pacific Legal Education Association) for employment.

Employees need to know a great deal about adolescent development. But they must also learn how to apply that knowledge effectively. Kids are whole people with strengths and with complex needs, who develop to adulthood in various ways, at various rates, and who have to adapt and respond to a variety of circumstances in their environments.

A particular program, service, or activity might be quite inappropriate for certain kinds of youth, and custom-made for others. A service might be great now for a particular youth, but ineffective six months from now. Some kids do poorly in excellent services; some kids will do well in almost anything. Staff must know enough to be able to figure out what a particular kid needs, what might work. It is important to be very flexible and willing to try new ideas. If a strategy is failing, change it. Our agency does not have the luxury of choosing not to work with a youth. We cannot blame the young person if our interventions do not succeed; we have to try something different until we find what works. So staff also have to be persistent “stubbornly refusing to give up on the kid or on their own abilities.

It is not good enough to learn to counsel; indeed, with some kids, counselling is a liability to be avoided. As a colleague once said, don’t use insight-oriented counselling if you know the kid has little insight or has good reason to resist insight.

Dealing with whole people means being able to bring to bear a variety of knowledge. Understanding and knowledge from psychology, education, social work, health, and other disciplines are all necessary in order to look at the whole kid. That knowledge must also be flavoured with a healthy dose of common sense.

Staff must have the ability to understand complex issues while dealing with them simply and directly, and without adding more complications. Our staff must be well educated. This does not mean they must all be graduates of the same program. Indeed, we prefer a mix of backgrounds: criminology, Native Education Centre criminal justice program, and probation officer training, in addition to the more traditional academic sources. We continue to hire staff without related post-secondary education who demonstrate either skill and experience or a particularly strong aptitude for the work. We are prepared to invest in extensive on-the-job training and supervision; however, we also expect employees to show initiative to upgrade their formal training.

All our staff should be eclectic experts in resources, and superb brokers or scroungers (or whatever it takes) in order to access the resources of the community. Our agency doesn’t provide much: an activity allowance, a car allowance, and stacks of resource information. Staff must be able to identify and track down any activity, service, or resource that might be useful, and then must open the doors to give their clients access to those services. So they also need excellent negotiating skills.

Our staff should be endlessly curious. There is a connection between learning problems and youth crime, and an essential ingredient of their work is to foster a kid's interest in learning, in expanded horizons, in hopeful opportunity.

Those who work with young people should genuinely enjoy any activity known to amuse teenagers or at least be able to fake an interest well. They must be ready at all times to participate fully “and with enthusiasm in whatever they can convince the kid to do. And then they must apply their ingenuity to encourage the kid to try things that are new or different. PLEA staff must learn about poverty. The poorer people are, the fewer choices they have regarding services and resources, and the less control they have over their access to and use of those services. Most of the kids we see are from poor families. We need to understand the context in which kids live, and to find respectful ways to work with that context.

We have to learn about dysfunctional families, and then have to forget almost everything we have learned. The problem is that we cannot change the facts of a youth’s family. More to the point, a youth’s parent is the only and, therefore, the best parent that youth will ever have. The professional had better find a way to work with what is, and to either build positively or, at a minimum, do no harm.

We must learn about a host of cultures other than our own, and confront our own prejudices. Look not just to the blatant forms of racism, but more importantly to the multitude of subtle ways in which minorities experience discriminatory attitudes. Look to the many ways in which sexist, heterosexist, and homophobic attitudes pervade many of the helping service. There is no room for them.

Learn about the law. Services to kids are ruled by federal and provincial laws that tell us what we can do and what we cannot do. There is no point railing against the perceived inadequacies of the Young Offenders Act or child welfare legislation; we have to learn to work with them and, more importantly, how to work creatively with them.

But it goes further: we also require an understanding of the laws and government policy that establish service standards and safety rules and place financial constraints on our services.

Because prospective youth workers will likely work for a nonprofit agency or for government, they should also know the Society Act and the legislation governing the public service.

This may sound like odd advice from an agency manager and employer, but I expect those planning a career working with youth to learn about employment standards and labour law. I hope they plan to become union activists. If they work in union shops, their collective agreements will govern most working conditions as well as pay and benefits. If they work in non-union environments, they are likely to work for less pay than others. If they do not get involved in these issues, they contribute to a lack of improvement in conditions for themselves and their clients. At the very least, if they do not get involved in unions, they should quit whining!

They should also take an interest in recognized professional organizations for which they qualify. Do not mistake them as substitutes for unions. Pay special attention to their codes of ethics: they are especially helpful in making those judgment calls when it is not obvious what the right course of action may be.

They should become politically interested and, preferably, politically active (in a political party freely chosen). Their careers are fully dependent on public policy. It is irresponsible to ignore the forums of public policy debate, whether they be through unions, professional organizations, political parties, or otherwise. There is a direct connection between work with a particular youth and the public policy frameworks established by government.

Staff should also learn to think like accountants or auditors, with attention to the proverbial “bottom line.” We cannot escape our times: we are reminded always that resources are limited; and that there is never enough money to do everything we need to do. I believe that we in the human services often unknowingly spend money unwisely and ineffectively, and that a major challenge in the next few years will be to train ourselves to think critically about our own work and about what things cost.

We must learn to be careful, and critical, in our use of language. If the kid you are working with does not clearly understand you, chances are that nobody else will either. Jargon, especially professional jargon, is great for impressing our friends in a bar, but at work it is essential that we speak and write in plain language. Our job is to understand and to be understood; if our clients, or their parents, or our colleagues have to guess what we really mean, we are failing in our responsibilities.

I have several suggestions of words and phrases that should be banned from work conversation:

–Empowerment:” Stuart Alcock, executive director of the British Columbia Association of Social Workers, suggests that you may only use this word if you can first tell him how you would recognize an empowered person if you met one on the street.

–Partnerships:” This is the newest buzzword to describe ideal working relationships, most often between government and contracted services, but increasingly in other contexts. It is a word taken from business and law, and with very particular meanings in those contexts that have no parallel in the human services.

If a word is not accurate, don’t use it.

(And I will award a special prize to the first person to provide me with a concise definition of my favourite new bit of jargon: “scoping the parameters.”)

It is important to maintain an active intellectual life. Read “read lots and read widely. Expose yourself to a variety of viewpoints, from a variety of disciplines. Exercise both creativity and discipline in your thinking, and in how you approach your work. Be open to new ideas, new views, new perspectives.

Finally, prospective employees should take management training, even if they think they wish only to work with young people and do not want to move to administrative or supervisory work. At PLEA we now look actively for applicants with management potential, even at entry levels. Management skills include the ability to analyze complex problems, the ability to plan strategically and organize effectively, the ability to monitor and evaluate outcomes, the ability to provide leadership. These abilities are all relevant to direct work with clients.

But effective management is also increasingly about service flexibility and change. Flexibility and change are, in my view, dominant themes facing the human services in this decade. Successful services will be characterized by their ability to respond flexibly to diverse needs, and by their ability to effect service delivery change smoothly and quickly. The same is true for successful staff.

This feature: Agg, Tim. (1994). The ideal new employee. Journal of Child and Youth Care, 9, 3. pp. 53-57.