| Sumario: | Social work educators have been trying to understand how best to prepare social work students for the difficult aspects of social work practice for many years and there continues to be a need to improve the social work education curriculum in relation to this issue. This article describes a study of Canadian early-career child protection social workers who graduated from an accredited social work program less than 2 years ago, had less than 2 years of child protection practice experience, and were under the age of 30, as well as their perceptions of the challenges they have experienced in their practice and their perceptions of how their social work education prepared them for these challenges. In this qualitative, interpretive description study, the intensity of the participants' experiences are compared to the depth of their educational preparation. Recommendations regarding social work curriculum development are discussed. The findings emphasize the need to build an in-depth curriculum that is more consistent with the experiences of early-career social workers.
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