ROSS DANIELS: The Master of Social Work is a relatively new course at QUT. This course offers you an opportunity to advance your skills in social work, or indeed to have a career change. It's formally recognised by the Australian Association of Social Workers and therefore that gives you qualification to practice social work around the world. To get into the course you need a degree that is formally recognised at an undergraduate level within Australia.

A really important feature of social work in the Australian context is that there are very good employment opportunities. Recent surveys by relevant agencies have indicated that there are good opportunities for employment across a wide variety of social work sectors. So that includes work in the hospital sector, opportunities within government sector, and particularly opportunities with a number of non-government organisations that operate in the social welfare and social work arena.

It is really important that if you undertake a social work course that you have a very clear appreciation of the type of work that you will be involved in. So within our course, it is grounded, well and truly, into real social work practice. That involves the integration of all of our academic units with social work practice, and in particular a great focus on getting out into the field, doing social work in a supervised context, and getting a real appreciation of the skills and knowledge and circumstances within which social work is practised. So we have a great emphasis here on real world social work practice as an integral feature of our course.

In designing the masters, we really took into account the fact that we live in a wonderful information and communication age. So if you do this course, you will find that a lot of the teaching and learning is done in the convenience of your own home, using a variety of information and communication technologies.

Social work is an extraordinary profession. It's all about the really good, the really bad, wonderful things that people can do, contributing to people in all sorts of circumstances. So if you're interested in a really interesting profession that gives you a real look at life on this planet then maybe the Master of Social Work is for you.