THE PROBLEM OF PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE TRANSFORMATION: ASPECT OF INSTITUTIONAL CARE

Transformationof professional competence is relevant in variousareas of social work practice, but the disclosure of this problem in theinstitutional care system is a new and extremely sensitive issue; the problemitself is also rather fresh. Theproblem is fresh because we talkabout the period from 2006 to 2011. The issue is sensitive because the persons,engaged in practicing traditional methods of working withchildren for many years, keep followingthe outdated concept of working with children. Theseare people who needed to adapt to the new requirements, which was extremelychallenging or even impossible for a large part of them. Today, the staff of childcare homes, who work with children, are social workers. Some of them came to workfor the institution with the required qualification, others had to get retrained,still others had to leave the system. This article reveals the nature ofprofessional competence construction in social work, based on accounts bysocial workers in child care homes about their relation to the profession.KEYWORDS: social work, institutional care, professional competence