National Child and Youth Care Practitioner Professional Certification: Promoting Competent Care for Children and Youth.

CHILD welfare; SOCIAL work with children; SOCIAL work with youth; SOCIAL workers; HUMAN services personnel; CERTIFICATION

This article provides an overview of the history, development, and conceptual framework guiding a national certification initiative for child and youth care workers. Summarized are descriptions of three certification assessment measures (supervisor assessment, situational judgment certification exam, and portfolio assessment), integrated with results from an international pilot validation study. The certification program is the first national effort to identify and assess underlying child and youth work competencies that transcend work setting (community-based to out-of-home care), population characteristics (diagnosed mental health concerns, experiencing child abuse, etc.), and age of the child/youth (early childhood through adolescence). he authors assert, building on a seven-year collaborative effort to establish the certification program, that it is time to transform the child and youth serving workforce crisis into an opportunity to bring together the varied child- and youth-caring fields into a united profession that has a rich knowledge and skill base of international scope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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