Social work careers span a wide variety of job opportunities in both public and private practice. Social workers can directly work with people they serve and it is common for them to volunteer their services. Hartman (2015) identifies a number of career opportunities that include work as administrators, supervisors, planners, researchers, or teachers. They are in various contexts such as child welfare administration and elderly care services. They also help in obtaining financial assistance and medical care for the elderly and other services that will enable them to live as independently as possible. They can work in clinics and community treatment centers to provide counseling to alcoholics and drug abusers. They can also work in public housing projects to help people find dwellings for families made homeless by urban crises, and in corporations and labor unions to provide a variety of work-related services including health counseling and retirement planning. They can work as social planning practitioners. Moreover, they can do fieldwork involving organizing and developing programs that deliver social service, and they can work as researchers on social service issues.
DuBois and Miley (2008) took a wider survey of areas of opportunities and traced a trend in recent years that indicated steady increase in the areas of home health, aging services, mental health, criminal justice, rehabilitation, and school-linked services. Elsewhere, they found areas that include forensic social work, corporate-based employee assistance, international practice and political social work, neighborhood-based, multidisciplinary service centers as ‘one-stop-shop’ ease access to a constellation of services including public assistance, employment services, literacy programs, family-centered services, juvenile court services, and health care.
The number of social work professionals in the Philippines are much smaller but they are present in a variety of settings, including hospitals, retirement homes, mental health clinics, schools, non-profit agencies, and government offices.