Writing your first social work résumé

Lead with placements, and treat them as real experience

Field placements are supervised professional practice, and hiring managers in this field read them that way. List them in your experience section with the setting, population, and your actual responsibilities — not in a separate, diminished 'student experience' block.

Describe what you did rather than what the agency did. 'Carried a caseload of 12 families' communicates more than 'assisted with family services.'

Be specific about populations and modalities

Social work hiring is unusually population-specific. A posting for adolescent substance use work is genuinely looking for someone who has sat with adolescents, and generic language hides the thing they're screening for.

Name the populations you have worked with, the settings, and any specific frameworks or modalities you have training in. If you have been trained in a particular model, say so explicitly — it is often a screening criterion.

• Populations: ages, presenting concerns, cultural and linguistic communities.
• Settings: inpatient, outpatient, school-based, home visiting, residential.
• Documentation systems and assessment tools you have actually used.
• Languages you can conduct a session in — a genuine differentiator, so don't bury it.

State your licensure status plainly

Put your current credential and, if relevant, your exam or licensure timeline near the top. Employers are staffing roles with specific licensure requirements, and ambiguity here gets résumés set aside.

If you are accruing supervised hours toward clinical licensure, say that directly — many employers are actively looking for people at that stage and some offer supervision as a benefit.