Mental health practitioner skills for your resume and career

Clinicians need to be flexible, express empathy and warmth to their clients, have good communication skills, be self-aware, apply a social justice lens to their work with clients, and practice from a place of cultural humility.

Clinicians need to have keen safety and clinical assessment skills. After COVID, we also learned that it's important for clinicians to navigate and adapt to providing services both in person and through telemental health.

Focusing on telehealth training could increase one's job options. Many workshops exist through various professional organizations tied to mental and spiritual health (ACA, APA, ACPE, SPT, PESI, etc.). If the student is interested in specialized certification (such as EMDR, DBT, etc.), they can also pursue those additional trainings during this time.

Graduates of the social work profession need to be able to work with individuals, families, groups, organizations, and mobilize communities to bring about social, economic, political, or environmental change, in addition to being involved in social policy development.

Skills in research, to study social issues, with the intention of developing social policy or micro-level approaches to practice to improve people's lives, and training in relation to multiculturalism, cultural competence, cultural humility practice is vital.

Key skills include:
-Collaboration
-Critical thinking
-Ethics in evidence based-practice
-Assessment, intervention, and evaluation
-Social work competencies to inform behaviors.
-Administration and management
-Community practice
-Policy practice