Human Service Professional Case Study

The research topic will focus on essential characteristics of human service professionals. Identifying fundamental characteristics that other successful people in the profession have, can create a key component to success for students and people entering into the field. This paper will discuss other research that has been done on characteristics required of human services professionals. The human services field can be a challenging profession. When a person is better prepared for job related challenges, there can be a higher success at overcoming obstacles. This makes knowing the essential characteristics of human service professionals worth studying because having the appropriate knowledge could increase career success. Researching characteristics

In the journal article, “Affect and the Lifeworld: Conceptualising Surviving and Thriving in the Human Service Professions” written by Brenton Prosser, Michelle Tuckey, and Sarah Wendt (2013) they discuss some new understandings of what enables human service professionals to deliver care and maintain their health. These new understandings could assist in retaining experienced staff, maintaining service quality, improving pre-service training, and developing new human service models (Prosser, Tuckey, Wendt, 2013, p.

Smith and Joel Shields (2013). The main reason to be concerned with low job satisfaction is worker turnover. Worker turnover is an enormous organizational cost in the social services field. The average cost is $5,500 to replace one $8.00 per hour frontline worker. The direct cost of worker turnover can be up to 60% per year. However, there are also indirect cost as well that can get overlooked. They include aspects such as lost productivity, deterioration in organizational culture and employee morale, and loss of continued services to families and individuals. Employers in the social service division are motivated to find ways to increase job satisfaction and lower turnover (Smith & Shields, 2013, pp.