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!