The MSW Coach

For years, people were told to choose the “right” college major because it would determine their career options long term.

The problem is that the hiring market has changed significantly over the last 20 years.

According to research from Harvard Business School and the Burning Glass Institute, employers have increasingly moved toward skills-based hiring and have been removing degree requirements across many occupations.

In fact, a majority of U.S. job postings no longer list a formal education requirement.

This is one of the reasons I spend so much time teaching social workers how to identify transferable experience.

Many professionals are still making career decisions based on an older version of the job market where degrees carried more weight than demonstrated experience and skills.

Your degree still matters.

But for many roles, employers are also evaluating your ability to solve problems, manage projects, navigate systems, communicate effectively, and produce results.

That’s why I’ve seen clinical, school, and medical social workers successfully pivot into research, policy, philanthropy, corporate work, and consulting.

If you’re trying to understand what else you may qualify for beyond traditional roles, grab my free e-course through the link in my bio and macroandpaid.com

Career confidence, or the lack thereof, is a topic that’s rarely discussed when it comes to securing employment or advancing in your career, but it’s a conversation I have with my coaching clients from day one.

Over the years, both in my own career and through working with thousands of job seekers and career professionals, I’ve learned that low career confidence is often a bigger barrier to securing employment than not having the “right” job titles or anything else people think is holding them back.

Low career confidence shows up in ways people don’t always recognize. It can look like second-guessing your qualifications, shrinking in interviews, overexplaining yourself, applying inconsistently, or staying loyal to jobs that no longer align with where you’re trying to go professionally.

If you’re talking about job searching, applying for jobs, and interviewing for jobs, but you’re not also addressing your career confidence through targeted, structured activities, eventually the inconsistency, hesitation, and self-doubt will show up in the process.

You can’t build a sustainable career while constantly questioning your value in the marketplace.

If you want to learn more about the process behind landing macro social work jobs on repeat, grab my free e-course at the link in bio

Happy macro career planning,
Marthea Pitts, MSW

Just because you have a degree in social work doesn't mean you have to use it to do the typical work social workers do.

Click the link in bio and visit macroandpaid.com to grab my free e-course to start exploring other ways to use your degree.

📷: Career Clarity session with a clinical social worker.

One good job will change your life, not just financially but also in quality.

Why All Career Related Content & Conversations is Not for You
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Ready to learn more about macro social work careers? Grab my free e-course at: https://macroandpaid.com/

What you heard in that clip wasn’t résumé writing.

It was me helping a social worker, just like you, make sense of what she was actually doing.

She started by describing her case management work in a way that felt accurate to her.

Very task-based. Very, “this is just what I did.”

And then we got to the supper events.

To her, it was just something she organized.

But when I pulled on it, what came up was a deeper, more intricate process to address the macro issue of food insecurity + time poverty for her clients:

1. She identified food insecurity as a barrier for her students and their families.

2. She designed a strategy to address that need.

3. And at the same time, she increased parent engagement by creating a reason for families to show up and stay connected.

That’s not just “hosting events.” That’s aligning services to remove barriers to participation.

That’s an engagement strategy/solution that macro employers value when looking for qualified applicants.

But her inability to identify this high-level experience is where most social workers get stuck.

Because when you’re the one doing the work in Micro settings as a practitioner, you don’t narrate it like this.

You just see yourself as responding in real time to problems as they come up.

Because you don't have the time, capacity, or knowledge to step back and label the strategy behind your decisions.

So when it’s time to talk about your experience, it comes out small. It comes out like tasks. It comes out like something anyone could’ve done.

When in reality, it was way more than that. If you want to learn more about what macro social work is, grab my free e-course in the bio and macroandpaid.com

Most professionals think the hardest part of a career move is figuring out what they want to do.

But that’s rarely the real problem.

Many people can clearly explain what type of work they want to do and why.

However, the real problem shows up when they start applying for jobs.

They apply to a startup one day.
A Fortune 500 company the next day.
And maybe a nonprofit or government agency the day after that.

Those organizations don’t operate in the same system.

They hire for completely different outcomes.

And evaluate experience differently.

And most importantly, they listen for completely different professional language.

A nonprofit organization is often listening for how you work with people, solve immediate problems, and create tangible outcomes for their clients or community.

A large corporation is often listening for how you drive measurable results, scale projects, and impact business outcomes.

If you approach both types of employers using the same framing of your experience, you will sound misaligned to both of them.

Not because you lack skills, education, or experience.

But because you are speaking a language the employer is not listening for.

This is why career clarity matters more than most professionals realize.

Career clarity is not only about identifying what you want to do. It’s about identifying the types of organizations you want to work in and understanding how those organizations interpret experience.

Once you understand that, you stop presenting your work the same way everywhere and start translating your experience into the language your target employer actually values.

That shift alone is often the difference between sending applications into a black hole and finally getting interviews.

Happy macro career planning,
Marthea Pitts, MSW