If at first you don't succeed.....keep going!

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While networking will certainly go a long way to helping a chartership trainee towards finding those opportunities to work towards the required competencies, the Stage 2 experience will definitely tease creative thinking out of you and intensly test your initiative.

Just take Core Role 3: Communicating psychological knowledge and advice to other professionals.  I have found one of the greatest challenges is to find work that would enable me to meet the requirements and the standards.  There were times when I was able to use work contacts, or my supervisor, or university contacts to help me meet and talk to people who might just help me give life to some of the projects I had in mind that would move my training forward.  But on numerous occasions, despite initially being greeted with enthusiasm, numerous projects never actually got off the ground or fizzled out because a lack of resources such as staff or funding.

 Inevitably I would end up feeling disappointed, frustrated and that I would never get the work finished.  But I quickly realised that these barriers were simply the sorts of contra-temps that professionals in most fields encounter and have to overcome.  So I began to look more closely at the work that I had carried out in order to get as far as I did in some of the projects.  It was soon obvious that a good deal of the preparation work could evidence some of the competencies and I was able to work this into my portfolio.  The moment I realised I could still use the work from failed projects was the moment I realised that there was always a silver lining.   

The projects I had developed had come from a number of different organisations where I had voluntary placements, for example from volunteering on a youth offender panel and also in an approved premises for male mentally disordered offenders.  Volunteering is a tremendously useful way of building up experience and a reputation in the field.  As I got to know staff and service users, attended volunteer meetings, read volunteer newsletters and got involved with the services, I was able to see what needs the service had and what fell within my remit.  I was then able to develop my thinking on the projects and planned these out in writing.  I wrote proposals to carry out the projects to both the youth offender panel and to the approved premises, through the usual volunteer systems.  I explained who I was, my background, my idea, the evidence for the idea from a needs analysis of the service and what I could offer them as a volunteer as part of continuing to evidence my practice.  I was also able to obtain letters of support written by my supervisor.

Having made plans and presented my ideas to the relevant managers, the projects fell through because of lack of funding or because the organisations in questions did not have sufficient staff resources to be able to bring the projects to full fruition.  However, by that point, I had been able to gather enough evidence to attribute some of the work to the core competencies.  For example, by making presentations of my ideas to the managers of these organisations, I was able to demonstrate the benefits of a psychological perspective on different projects.  I needed to make a formal needs analysis of each of my ideas and formalise these into a proposal, which resulted in my creating opportunities to advise and guide other professionals using phsychological advice.  I also needed to submit formal proposals, attend and minute any meetings held to discuss the proposals and their design and eventual evaluation, as well as the potential benefits, and I had to present the proposals formally.

In order to make sure that your experiences can be used to evidence the competencies, I would strongly suggest keeping a log of any psychological advice that you give, for example, how to select appropriate outcome measures and evaluating any programme that you design.  It is also essential for this particular core competency to record and provide evidence of any feedback that you give staff members and professionals.  Through the use of collating evidence from even failed projects, it is even possible to evidence Core competency 3.3, which deals with providing advice and guidance in the formulation of policy.  I am at a stage now with this core role that I will be ready to submit for assessment in the next 6 months.  The collection of evidence has taken almost four years of some failed projects and some successful.  And my suggestions of how to present evidence has come from my supervisor and trainees who have recently passed this core role.

It is so easy to be disheartened when projects fall through, especially if several fall through one after the other - there is an inevitability to this that we all have to face.  But the secret to getting through it is to evaluate your work, apply the requirements of the competencies to it - always checking with your supervisor who will keep your feet firmly on the ground on the production of evidence.  It is worth always being open to opportunities and always to approach each project with the competencies you have not yet evidenced in mind.  This certainly helped me to feel that I was ticking off the boxes rather than feeling that I was having to start everything from scratch.  

Best of luck everyone and happy reading.

Carry on Networking

In my last post, I talked about making the most of networking opportunities, and I've found myself reflecting more on this of late.  If you happen to be working in a field directly associated with forensic psychology in practise, then you will have a plethora of opportunities not just for networking, but through your working practices, opportunities to address most of the competencies required in the BPS Stage 2 Chartership qualification.  That is rarely the case, and most of us have to be pretty imaginative at times to find or create those opportunities.  It is that creative thinking that helps to define us as professional forensic psychologists which keep us pushing the boundaries of this developing field.

Networking is a broad concept so it is best, I find, to think about it in a broad context.  In my place of work, a research institution, while I am well-placed on some of the core competencies (mostly Core Roles 3 and 4 surprisingly), I have had to work hard to set up opportunities to work elsewhere, usually through voluntary work, to meet some of the other requirements.  Your supervisor will have talked you through most of this, but I wanted to share some of what I have learnt with you.  Through membership of the BPS I was able to access many opportunities to attend conferences, seminars and training courses.  There were also others that I was able to access through work, such as workshops on transforming rehabilitation.

Of course, attending courses and seminars is useful purely for the basic reason of increasing skills or knowledge in a particular area of expertise, but it is useful to use those opportunities to meet other professionals, and to introduce yourself, your organisation, your particular field of expertise and to develop those relationships further for example, at one seminar I was paired for a task with a gentleman you manages a charity in prisons. This opened up an opportunity for me to visit his charity in a prison and provided me with the scope to write an article for the Division of Forensic Psychology. 

 Once you've broken the ice and have met a number of people, you will be able to exchange email addresses, find each other on Twitter, Facebook etc. and communicate.  If you work these relationships you may well find that you are asked to give presentations on your field of research.  Or better still, you will start to make connections between different fields and create those opportunities to present your work to others for example, speaking at a seminar on rehabilitating young offenders with drug issues can give you a chance to offer your research or experience in making a presentation to other professionals.

Sometimes, though, it is worth thinking outside the box a little.  Take a situation where you or your organisation is dealing directly with certain clients.  It may be the case that the local social services department calls a case conference.  You will often know about it because even though you may not have been directly invited, your client might have told you.  At this point, it may be worthwhile using your network of local contacts to see if you might be able to obtain an invitation to this.  Or, if it is pertinent, you may be able to write in to the relevant case leader and offer your expertise on the client and on the issues associated.  It is part of your applied work as a psychologist in practise and a further opportunity to develop inter-agency and inter-professional networks.  This links directly to Core Role 1, Competency 1.3 - establishing, developing and maintaining working relationships, as well as to Core Role 3.

So far so good on physical, personal networking, and in my experience, this basic legwork - attending events, talking to people at the coffee breaks, exchanging contact details and quickly making those contacts and following them up - is the best way of networking. But what about social media networking?  Social media is relatively new, and technology has not yet taken the place of gathering together a disparate set of professionals from a rangeof fields in one room.  But it can certainly support your drive to broaden your spectrum of contacts and support the spread of the expertise that you, personally or through your workplace, are developing.  So maybe you will have a Twitter account and follow and tweet with other forensic psychologists, the great thing about Twitter being its global reach.  What are the issues for forensic psychology as a theoretical specialism in Capetown, Ottawa and Canberra, for example?  If you publish articles, you can blog about them and invite your followers to engage in on-line discussion.  You might have a web-site and hold a regular forum for debate for other forensic psychologists.  You can use Facebook to keep in touch with people you meet at conferences, seminars etc.  You can use Google Hangouts to hold discussions on particular areas that you are working on and you know others have an interest.  Again, the beauty of this is that it is international, you set a hangout for a specific time and a specific subject and you invite people to turn up - all in the comfort of your own home.  No displacement, no catching trains on rainy nights, and the exchange of information with professionals can take place.  Like I said earlier, it is all about creative thinking.

Once you have been able to establish links, however tenuous, with local agencies, which can include the local NHS as well as social services, universities and training institutions, charities etc. you have a foot in the door.  You will be able to use those personal links when you meet people you know at various local seminars etc. to be able to promote your work, your knowledge and expand on what you know.  Successful networking leads to more than just meeting of the standards you need to achieve in the Stage 2 training.  It leads to a personal and professional enrichment, especially when you get to the stage where you are sought after to deliver in-house training, or write a contribution for a specialist journal, or when you are called upon to contribute to a  think tank in the redesign of a service that will directly benefit clients and society as a whole and drive forward the quest for knowledge and the dissemination of knowledge in our field.

So, if you're not totally sold on networking yet, and need more ideas, comment on this article, leave contact details, and I'll be right back in touch: networking is a two-way dialogue all the time!

Networking for trainees

After a prolonged absence I am back writing my blog, hopefully with new and wonderful experiences and learning to help my fellow trainees.  I will apologize however for my writing style, I am a little rusty.

Onward we go to talk about Networking.

Many trainees will be at varying stages of training and experience and working in settings that will allow for different networking opportunities.  This sounds obvious of course but what isn't obvious is what you can do to help yourself in these instances and support fellow trainees in the process.  For example, I have two friends who I completed my masters with, both who have more relevant job roles than I do but neither have the research experience that I have.  I am able to support them in Core Role 2 and in exchange they are able to support me in other Core Roles where I may be lacking contacts or experience.

The Division of Forensic Psychology (DFP) conference was a fantastic way to network.  I met two individuals there who have helped me organize one of my research exemplars and this was achieved through speaking to people who I share an interest with.  Conference attendees are all very aware of the networking opportunities that there are, so you have to have something that others don't.  For me, I found people with a shared interest but I also had a consolidated idea of the project that I wanted to develop.  This made it easier for me to engage in conversation on the subject and illustrate that I was the person who could take this project forward.

In a karma inspired exchange, I met two trainees at the conference, one from India and the other from Portugal.  I was able to put them in contact with colleagues of mine that have a shared interest to theirs and hopefully they will find those contacts useful.

I have found that attending training also has this added benefit.  I have met some fantastic trainees at DFP specific training events who have helped explain the processes and procedures of the Stage 2 Qualifications to me; who have offered me their help should I need it with particular projects and put me in touch with areas of potential placements.

I think the moral of this post is that I have found that although this arena is competitive and littered with obstacles, have faith in one's colleagues and fellow trainees.  We are all in this together and understand what each other going through in order to qualify.  Secondly, conferences and training don't just improve your CPD but can also improve the breadth of your network.

Until next time......