My Placement journey has been one of many mixed emotions. I have found myself at times feeling very frustrated and despondent but on the upside I have been given opportunity to meet and learn from some very skilled and professional youth workers. My Placement began at my current workplace and I had completed 100 hours, but I was finding it hard to separate myself from my worker role to my student role also at times some minor conflict was present between my placement supervisor who was also my work peer when I was there on my normal employment days. At first the dual roles worked fine but soon issues started to arise as I felt when I was in my student role and attending groups my supervisor would undermine me in front of service users who in some instances were my clients. By undertaking my placement in my place of employment often staff and management were confused about the different roles and the boundaries associated with each role. Although I was a student I was also a paid staff member and I often felt some staff expected me to show unreasonable flexibility in work/ student activities. I don’t feel I achived any considerable learning from the 100 hours as it was assumed I already knew how things operated. I also admit as I already knew the requirements I just got on and did what needed to be done and forgot to stand back and observe the different family support workers practice methods. As I entered the placement with pre-conceived notions of “ I knew what was expected of me” I did not set any proper learning objectives or tasks, this compromised my learning greatly.
My Placement was terminated and I was back at the beginning of trying to find something new. As I am a single parent and financially could not afford to work less than three days I requested to undertake my placement on weekends.
Eventually a placement was secured for me at Uniting Care within the residential out of
References: 2. Cairns, K. (2002). Attachment, Trauma and Resilience: Therapeutic caring for children. London: British Association for Adoption and Fostering. 3. Rutter, M. (1999) .Resilience concepts and findings: implications for family therapy. Journal of Family Therapy, Vol. 21.