Frontline workers’ competency in activation work
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Date
2018-04-02Metadata
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Original version
Sadeghi T, Fekjær SBF. Frontline workers’ competency in activation work. International Journal of Social Welfare. 2018:77-88 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ijsw.12320Abstract
Frontline workers play a crucial role in implementing activation policies. Nevertheless,
research on the competencies required for activation work is limited. We explored activation
competency based on a survey of 1,735 frontline workers in the Norwegian labour and
welfare administration. Factor analysis revealed two distinct underlying dimensions in
activation competency: market competency and user-oriented competency. We found that the
social workers in the study viewed themselves as having significantly less market competency
and slightly more user-oriented competency than non-social workers have, but the differences
were small. The results also indicate that these effects are partially mediated by attitudes
towards conditionality. The results give reason to treat activation competencies as twofold
and raise the question of whether social work education improves frontline workers’
competency in activation work compared with frontline workers with other educational
backgrounds.