My top tips for a painless CILIP Revalidation

I’d been putting Revalidation off. If you’re reading this, it’s likely you have been too. It was one of those things that I knew I should do, but it kept slipping down my to-do list, and I didn’t really know what it entailed, and then the CILIP VLE looked complicated and fiddly. Sometime late last year I decided that enough time had passed since my Chartership and I really should be re-evaluating my personal development, particularly since I had moved up the ladder to a new role at another institution since Chartering.  When I actually looked into what I needed to do, and started to do it, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was actually a fairly easy process! 

This post assumes that you know what Revalidation involves. If you don’t, go and read Jo Alcock’s comprehensiveblog posts about it. Even if you think you know what you’re doing, go and read them anyway; I found them immensely helpful in getting to grips with what I needed to do. 

Once you’re ready to get started, here are my top tips for making the whole thing as painless as possible…

Bear the criteria in mind when recording your CPD. You need to show you have met the criteria for whichever qualification you are revalidating. Go and read the relevant handbook (the Chartership criteria at least have changed a bit since I Chartered in 2012) to make sure you know what they are. I then copied and pasted them into my document where I was recording my CPD, and added another column to the table I was using where I stated which criterion/a that particular activity met. This will make it easier to identify any gaps, and to write your reflective statement. You don’t have many words to play with (more on this later) so don’t try to pigeonhole in anything that doesn’t fit the criteria. 

Don’t rely on your memory. You’ll remember events you’ve been to or training you’ve done, but going back through your emails, diary, and notes from meetings with your manager or team meetings may remind you of other bits and pieces which have contributed to your CPD. Bringing me to my next point…

…Think outside the box. You already know that things like reading Update and other professional literature, or taking part in Twitter chats such as #uklibchat, count towards your CPD just as much as formal training opportunities do, but examine your everyday activities even more closely. Have you written blog posts about things you’ve done, had a chat with anyone about issues and challenges, or taken on any kind of mentoring or advisor role, however informal, for a less experienced colleague? Even seemingly unremarkable things will have contributed to your development, and these can be included too.

You don’t have space to be anything other than reflective! Remember how hard it was to cram everything you wanted to say into your 1000-word statement for Chartership? Well, this time you only have 250 words – just 25% of that space! It’s all about the reflection. I recommend identifying and using the main keywords from the criteria (easy – we’re librarians!) in your statement, to really draw the assessor’s attention to how you’ve met them, without wasting words on description. Just as you were advised to do with your Chartership portfolio, make the assessor’s life as easy as possible!

And finally…just get on with it! I think it probably only took me a total of about eight hours over a few weeks to get my CPD recorded, write my statement and upload it all. If I’d been in better habits with recording my CPD as I went along, it would have taken me even less time! It’s really not an arduous process, so make some time to become familiar with it, starting putting together your CPD record, and I reckon you’ll find it much easier than you expected.

Do you have any other top tips for a painless Revalidation? Feel free to share them in the comments!

I'm Chartered! Some thoughts and tips

This is a somewhat delayed blog post, but NaNoWriMo and then Christmas got in the way of me writing anything on my experience of Chartership. I submitted my portfolio in September and received the happy news that I was successful in November. Now that I’ve had some time to reflect on the experience, I’d like to share some of my thoughts and tips for those in the process.

I registered for Chartership in March 2011, four months after I started my first professional role, six months after completing my Librarianship MA. I had initially wondered if it was too early to start, but I was encouraged by colleagues who had completed or who were completing to register and make a start on it. I had a few reasons for wanting to Charter:

• It would provide evidence of my commitment to my personal development, the development of the service in which I worked, and my involvement in the profession. *I* knew that I had this commitment, but having evidence to demonstrate to others is always helpful.

• I felt that it would help me to really identify the areas on which I wanted to concentrate, the ones in which I needed to develop most. As a newly-qualified person in my first librarian post I felt a bit like I wanted to do and learn everything, a feeling which was exacerbated by the nature of my role which covered a range of aspects and responsibilities, so I thought it would be helpful to learn how to focus my development plans.

• It seemed like the logical next step, after my MA and then getting my first professional role.

After reading the Chartership handbook and instructions, and sending off my registration form, my next step was to find a mentor. I know that recently a lot of people have been finding it difficult. I was lucky in that the first mentor I contacted was happy to take me on, and a phone conversation between us confirmed that we felt the relationship would work. However, I did find that there wasn’t a great deal of choice in my area; many mentors listed on the CILIP website were full, or only taking mentees from their own organisation. I selected my mentor because she was in the same sector as me, but in a different institution; so she would pick up on anything that I wasn’t explaining adequately for someone who didn’t work in my library. Although we were both in the South West region, my mentor was in Plymouth and I was in Bristol, so it was actually a distance mentoring arrangement (it’s a big region!). I found this worked fine; we agreed in our mentoring agreement how contact would work – email for the most part, telephone if there were problems to sort out, and me arranging a trip to Plymouth to meet face-to-face if there were problems which could not be resolved any other way. It turned out that email sufficed for us, with additional use of Dropbox towards the end when I was sending her sections of my portfolio to look at – in this way I could send her links to the documents rather than attaching large files to emails. My mentor was brilliant; she was really supportive and answered my emails swiftly and helpfully. If you’re struggling to find a mentor I would recommend considering a distance mentoring arrangement, but do make sure you both set out what is expected of each other re: communication when you put together your mentoring agreement. 

I then attended a “Preparing for Chartership” course. I blogged about how useful I found this here, so I won’t repeat it; I’ll just say that, although you can attend one of these at any point during the process, I recommend attending one as soon as you can, as it was so helpful. You only need to attend one of these courses, but I also attended a “Building your Portfolio” course a year later too, as I was struggling; as blogged here, I found this one helpful too for building up my motivation again.

I was aiming to submit my portfolio in July 2012, and it ended up being September, so I actually didn’t miss my original deadline by too far, but I do think I could have completed it earlier. I spent a lot of time feeling daunted by the process when, on reflection, I really didn’t need to. My main tip therefore is to just get on with it! Easier said than done, but hopefully my other tips will suggest ways in which the process can seem less daunting…

Be smart and organised in the way you collect your evidence. I fell into the trap of putting anything I thought might be evidence into folders (physical and electronic). When it came to putting my portfolio together, I had a lot of stuff that I actually didn’t need, and I had to spend time looking through other locations to find bits I did need. If I were doing it again I would think before keeping something; will I use it – which bit of my PPDP and which criteria does it relate to? Is it useful and meaningful or does it need something added? Is it reflective (more about reflection in the next tip)? I would also try to organise my folders by criteria right from the start – this is something I only started doing later on. Trust me, you will thank yourself when it comes to putting the final thing together.

Reflection doesn’t have to be a long piece of writing – this is something that the ever-wonderful Annette told me once, and I found it helpful to bear in mind throughout the process. Some pieces of reflective evidence will usually be blocks of writing of course – reports from visits, or write-ups of projects, for example – but sometimes all you need is a few sentences, which was the case with lots of my bits of evidence; for example, just a line or two about why this particular piece is in my portfolio i.e. what it shows.

Review your PPDP regularly. I think I was actually quite good at this – my job changed so much and so frequently during the time I was gathering evidence, I found I had to keep re-assessing what the areas I needed to develop in were. Even if you’re not in a similar position, you still need to be going back to it regularly – it is supposed to be an evolving document and should not be the same at the end of the process as it was at the start. This should also hopefully help with your smart and organised collection of evidence, as described above!

Get all the little things right. Read the submission guidelines carefully and check several times that you’ve included all the bits you need i.e. CV, organisational objectives, mentoring agreement – there’s a clear list in the handbook. Don’t fall down on copyright or data protection issues – blank out names and details if they don’t need to be there, seek permission to include things written by someone else and any names that need to be included, and state that you have done so (I put a statement in at the start of my portfolio that permission had been sought). If you’re worried or unsure about anything, ask your mentor for advice.

Find Chartership communities for mutual support! There is a fantastic Chartership community on Twitter, using the hashtag #chartership to share progress, thoughts and experiences and to ask questions. There are plenty of already-Chartered people getting involved to answer questions too. Every so often there is a #chartership chat, but the hashtag is active all of the time. If you’re not on Twitter already I would even recommend joining just for the #chartership support. Don’t forget real-life communities too – we had a little cross-campus Chartership support group at work, meeting for a coffee every so often, and I also had other meet-ups with other candidates.

Have a look at some successful portfolios – I found it really helpful to see how others had approached it. There are some on the CILIP website, some on LISNPN, your local CILIP CDG Candidate Support Officer will have some, and if you ask nicely, a friend or colleague might share theirs. That said, don’t compare your portfolio to others’ too much – successful portfolios differ wildly in length and approach. Mine was very long, about twice what many portfolios are, and whilst the feedback that I got was that I should more selective in my evidence when I come to submitting for Revalidation, it still passed. 

If you’re struggling, ask for help. Ask your mentor – that’s what they’re there for! Find out who your local Candidate Support Officer is and ask them. Email the Qualifications team at CILIP – they are really helpful. Ask on Twitter to see what others think. It can at times feel like a very vague and daunting process, and no question is too daft!

Lastly – if you’re not already aware, you can now submit electronically. I would recommend this approach as it will save you money on printing and postage! Do read the guidelines for this on the CILIP website carefully.

Was Chartership worth it? Yes, I feel. I have a document which evidences how hard I have worked to develop myself, my service and my professional involvement, during challenging times at my workplace, and I have been recognised for this effort and commitment by my professional body. I was able to devise a focused, appropriate development plan, and, as a result of the reflection throughout my portfolio, have been able to identify areas to work on in the future. I feel able to take control of my own development and to continue to identify what my strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are. 

This leads me to “what’s next?” Well, I’m not thinking about Revalidation just yet, but I am continuing to think about my personal development in a focused way, and also to collect useful and relevant evidence (bearing in mind my own tips on being smart and organised with this!). I don’t feel that I could commit the time to being a mentor at the moment, but in the future I would definitely like to do this. In the meantime, I am helping out where I can, on the #chartership hashtag and also advising friends and colleagues who are in the process or thinking about it.

I hope that this post has been helpful in some way to someone! If you’re thinking about Chartership, I would encourage you to go ahead with it, and if you’re struggling, I urge you to keep going! It will be worth it.

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.