My 10 tips and tricks for a happy(ish) Chartership!

I've just returned from a lovely afternoon at a portfolio-building event in Cambridge, to which I'd gone along to speak about my experience of Chartership. I enjoyed listening to the other talks as well as giving mine, and it was a great opportunity to meet some new people and make some contacts. It was also my first experience of creating and delivering my own Prezi, from scratch, and after some initial tech panics, it seemed to go OK! Here's my Prezi (also embedded below) for anyone else who's interested. If I can help with your Chartership at all, do get in touch; I remember how tough a process it can be and so I'm eager to support others where I can.

Happy portfolio-building!

Getting back on track with my Chartership portfolio

It’s nearly a year ago that I registered for Chartership, found myself a mentor, went along to a “Preparing for Chartership and Certification” course and wrote this enthusiastic post about how I could totally do this whole Chartership thing, aiming to be ready to submit by July 2012. However, in recent months I have been feeling a bit lost with it, knowing that I am doing loads of stuff to go into my portfolio and developing personally and professionally, but feeling like I am too disorganised and losing my grip on actually building my portfolio. The first #chartership chat on Twitter in February left me feeling like everyone except me was on top of things, so I decided it was time to do something about it! I booked myself onto a “Building your portfolio” course which was running in Bath on 3^rd March, and designated the 2^nd March, a day which I was taking off work in order to use up annual leave, to my portfolio.

Yesterday was my “Chartership day” and I’m really glad I decided to spend a day looking at my portfolio; I started to sort myself out and feel better about it. The evening before, I had joined in on the second #chartership Twitter chat, and found it much more useful now that I knew I was going to give some time to sorting my progress out. I reflected on my PPDP, realising that I have met several of my development needs already and have lots of evidence to demonstrate this, a couple of my development needs are no longer relevant or applicable because of changes in priorities at work, one still needs more work, and I needed to add several more as a result of changes, both in my role and in my personal ambitions, over the past year. I also looked at the criteria and began to identify where the gaps are in the evidence I’ve collected so far, which has helped me to identify where I still have work to do. I was left feeling like I had made more progress than I realised, I knew what I still needed to do, and I could maybe even make the deadline I originally set for myself.

Today was the “Building your portfolio” course, which I found really helpful and motivating. Nicki and Lizz reminded us of various bits of the regulations, and some tips for building a portfolio in terms of collecting, organising and presenting evidence, and writing the evaluative statement. There was lots of interactivity throughout the morning which I found useful; sharing experiences and ideas with others is a really good way of prompting new thoughts I think. The most useful exercise for me was one in which we took a large sheet of flip-chart paper, divided it into sections for each of the criteria given in the Chartership handbook, and in small groups discussed what kinds of things we could use as evidence for each one. I found this helpful for two reasons; firstly because others in the session suggested items of evidence that I hadn’t thought of, thus providing me with some further ideas for demonstrating that I have met the criteria, and also because discussing the types of evidence for each criterion confirmed to me that I had correctly identified the gaps in my portfolio yesterday. The other aspects of the workshop which I found particularly useful were the opportunities to look at successful portfolios, and to discuss issues, ideas and questions with other MCLIP candidates. The #chartership Chat on Twitter is a great place to do this, but not everyone is on Twitter, and so events like this provide a valuable opportunity to meet and speak with other candidates from a variety of backgrounds.

One of the questions I was still pondering when I turned up at the course this morning was how to organise my collection of evidence; how and where to keep it all? I have a folder at work into which I put any pieces of paper which could be used as evidence, and my electronic evidence is spread out across my work filespace, laptop filespace, and email inboxes – really not organised enough at this stage! Lizz and Nicki gave us several suggestions for this, and as a result of their ideas I am going to try using Dropbox as a place to store all of my evidence. It can be used online in a web browser but you can also download it to sync with your desktop and your smartphone, so it’s a good way of storing documents so that they can be accessed from wherever you are. I will keep the print folder in case I want to add anything for which I have no electronic version, but as you can now submit your portfolio completely in electronic form (hooray!) I am not going to keep duplicate print copies; I will get rid of anything in that folder which I have in electronic copy, and make sure the electronic copy is in my Dropbox.

A few other useful tips that I picked up from today are:

• Assessors are now failing portfolios if any of the evidence contains personal data for other people, or breaches copyright. Be really careful to anonymise anything referring to other people, do not reveal sensitive data, and consider copyright laws and good practice. I know that after putting all that work in, I would find it really frustrating to fail on something like this so I am going to check everything really carefully!

• Don’t make the assessor think! Make sure your portfolio is clear and well laid-out, and that the evidence you point to in your evaluative statement is easy to locate. If your assessor has to start thinking about how they are supposed to find things in your portfolio, they will begin to look at it in a more critical light.

• Don’t make your own copy of your portfolio; it will be sent back to you so you will have a copy to keep.

• The Chartership matrix can be a useful tool when you’re coming to the end of building your portfolio, and want to select only the really relevant evidence from what you’ve amassed. Fill in this grid with your various bits of evidence, and then you can easily see which pieces meet all of the criteria; these should be the ones to go in your portfolio.

• And finally, as previously mentioned, it is now possible to submit your portfolio completely electronically! It will still need to be in triplicate though, so you will need to send it on three USB sticks or discs. More information on this new development is available on the CILIP website.

I left the course feeling really positive and looking forward to getting back into building my portfolio. We were very helpfully provided with the forthcoming assessment board dates, which has helped me to form a deadline: I would like to have submitted my portfolio by the end of August of this year. My next step now is getting my evidence collected so far into some kind of order in my Dropbox by criteria, and starting to create something that actually looks like a portfolio.

Perhaps Chartership isn’t that scary after all!

As some of you might know, I’ve been thinking about Chartership for a while – since I started my job back in November in fact. I’m always looking for the next thing to do to develop and progress, and Chartership seemed like the logical next step. After a couple of months of reading and re-reading the Chartership instructions and information on the CILIP website, and panicking about the whole finding a mentor business, the various acronyms that kept cropping up, and the sheer scale of the thing, I recently decided it was time to jump in at the deep end, and send my registration form off then start the hunt for a mentor. 

I was lucky in that the first mentor I emailed was happy to take me on. She works in the same sector but in a different university – after taking advice from various people on the pros and cons of having a mentor in the same organisation, versus one from outside, I decided that it would be more helpful to select a mentor who didn’t work for my university, in order to avoid the risk of inadequate explanation or evaluation in my portfolio due to them understanding the context behind things. We had a telephone conversation earlier in the week, which was very successful – we seem to be on the same wavelength and I entirely trust in her abilities as a mentor – and we decided to progress with the mentoring relationship. 

It’s been a fairly Chartership-filled week, as yesterday I attended a “Preparing for Chartership and Certification” course run by the CILIP West Country Career Development Group. Attending one of these courses is, I believe, a requirement for Chartership, and I decided to do it sooner rather than later, in the hope that it would help to make everything make sense to me.  It was a really useful day; a good mix of presentations outlining things like the assessment criteria and the types of evidence that can go in your portfolio, group activities such as identifying skills and sources of training together, which I found really helped to get me thinking about my own skills audit and Personal Professional Development Plan (PPDP), and opportunities to network with the other attendees – exchanging contact details with people working in other types of library or information service may potentially be helpful in arranging visits to other libraries, which will contribute to our understand of the wider profession, one of the Chartership assessment criteria.

I won’t write a detailed account of the day, but I will share just a couple of the many useful things that I found out:

• Your local CDG Candidate Support Officer (CSO) can help with pretty much anything to do with your Chartership, from helping you to construct your PPDP, to resolving problems in the mentor/mentee relationship. I knew from my own involvement on CDG committees that each had a CSO, but I was unaware of the extent to which they can offer help and advice. I fully trust in my mentor’s ability to help, but it’s good to know that there is someone else who can cast a second eye over my PPDP, or can answer any questions that I feel are too daft to put to my mentor! You can find your local CSO on the CILIP website.

• Blogs can be used as your evaluative diary. We were told that keeping some kind of diary, in which you evaluate your recent activities, will be really helpful when it comes to writing the evaluative statement to go with your portfolio, and that we should use whatever kind of diary or record works for us, including blogs. I suspected that my blogging would be useful in keeping my reflective/evaluative writing skills up to scratch, but I thought I would need to record things in a separate space for Chartership; it was good to find out that I can continue to blog about what I’m doing as a means of evaluative recording, as this is the format that works for me, and I don’t want to completely separate things off as being “Chartership” activities – everything I do over the next year or so will be contributing to Chartership.

The main thing that I realised after the day was that, in fact, I’m actually doing a lot of the things required for Chartership already; keeping records of activities like the teaching that I do, and other things that I get involved with, as well as a “staff development log” of in-house training that I attend and what I’ve gained from it, reflecting upon and evaluating activities and events through blog posts, collecting evidence i.e. feedback from teaching sessions, furthering my professional involvement through committee membership and publishing work in the professional press, and ensuring I develop my understanding of the wider profession and my place in it, through reading about what is going on in mine and other LIS sectors, and keeping up-to-date via blogs, mailing lists, and Twitter. So now, Chartership doesn’t seem like such a huge, scary prospect! Yes, it’s a big thing, a long process that will require hard work, enthusiasm, dedication and organisation, but I feel now that it is completely do-able for me. This weekend I shall start work on my initial PPDP draft, and I am looking forward to getting stuck in and getting on my way with Chartership. I really encourage anyone else in my position to just go for it – get registered, look for a mentor, go to a “preparing for Chartership course” (list here, or keep an eye on the events page on LISNPN), and don’t be scared or intimidated – as I discovered, you’re probably in a Chartership frame of mind already.