Time for training

Photo "Stopwatch on Wooden Table" by start08, courtesy of www.FreeDigitalPhotos.net

No-one expects advanced training in any profession to be a walk in the park, not least those of us who embarked on the training for chartership as forensic psychologists. When we set off down that particular road, we know that there will be huge demands on us.  We will be applying our academic abilities, our abilities to analyse and interpret research, apply this in a practical setting and much more.  We know that the training will be demanding and involve a great deal of hard work. 

One of the difficulties I encountered was that of managing my time so that I could fit all this additional challenge into my daily life.  Like most trainees, I needed a day job, but there is a vast amount of work to get through to achieve chartership. How people manage their time is very much up to their individual circumstances and to their personal priorities.  For example, I chose to go straight onto a three-hour placement as soon as my day at work had finished, usually twice a week,sometimes more often.  Then, also after work throughout the rest of the week, I had to find the time to write up all the notes and also make sure that a supervision session was squeezed in. I also had to find pockets of time to shop for food, cook and eat it, do the chores and - he is a remarkably patient and supportive partner - give my relationship with my partner, my family and  my friends some attention. Not everyone will chose to do it this way, nor will be able to because of their personal circumstances.

It is important to be realistic as to what you can achieve in any given timescale.  If your day job is particularly demanding, for example, how much time outside of this you can dedicate to your training requirements may be more limited.  That does not mean giving up, but just setting goals that can be achieved in small chunks, and accepting that the qualification will take longer to achieve. 

Plan Diagram by Stuart Miles, courtesy of www.FreeDigitalPhotos.net

It is also helpful to plan meticulously.  For example, if your job is such that you cannot guarantee leaving at a specific time on a specific day, you may not be able to schedule your placements or your supervision that easily.  The stress that this sort of situation can cause you will result in your being disheartened and will certainly not be any good for the organisations you are volunteering in or their service users.  While planning, it is worth taking into account just how much a particular placement will suit you and your personal circumstances and balance this against the core roles that you can achieve in that placement.  Instead of evening placements, then, perhaps a weekend placement may be more suitable.

An important aspect of managing time for training, is also to not neglect health.  The feeling of constantly working and striving can be stressful. Add to that the usual anxieties of trying to meet the standards required for submission and meeting the exemplars, and your immune system can feel under attack.  I know that I had to make sure I dedicated regular pockets of time to exercise and leisure activities by taking short breaks, occasional holidays and making sure I carried out some form of fitness activity every week - I went swimming, cycling, running, for example, and for a while I played in a ladies rugby team, which did wonders for my fitness, my resilience, my resolve, and my social life.  All of which somehow supported the dedication I was making to my training.

Photo "Woman on Running Machine in Gym" by Photostock, courtesy of www.FreeDigitalPhoto.net 

The general rule of thumb is that the more active you are, the more energy you have to expend on more activities.  You may find that working a couple of evenings a week will enthuse and energise you and the progress you see yourself making all enhances the motivation that you feel to continue.  Having said that, it is very important to be self - aware, to look for those clues to low energy levels, to be open to those thoughts about being too tired to be bothered.  At this point, it is always worth taking a brief break - properly managed, of course, to suit the placement service users in particular.  This in itself is a key part of learning for your qualification and preparing for professional life.

If you are extremely fortunate, of course, you may well be able to negotiate a short sabbatical from work in order to take your placement, or in fact your work provides you with a particularly relevant placement.  Most of us are not that fortunate, however, so we must make ourselves familiar with the mantra of: plan, schedule, negotiate, balance.  In fact, we will become so good at it, that it will provide a tremendously strong base for us as professionals and in all aspects of our lives.

Photo by Stuart Miles, courtesy of www.FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Money Matters for training success

Sinking money into your training - photo "Pound Sinking in Sea" by Stuart Miles courtesy of www.FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Since starting to blog on my experiences as a Forensic Phsychologist in Training Stage 2, I have had numerous comments and interactions from readers who are either at various stages of the training or are considering embarking on the training, and are concerned about funding.  Of course, how you organise the financing of this professional training is crucial not just to attaining Chartership, but also to avoid an additional stress when in the depths of carrying out the work necessary, arranging supervision and so on.  So I decided to summarise what I had to do to pay for the training.

I have to admit I have not fully kept tabs on all the costs.  Perhaps if I had, the enormity of it would have had me abandon ship.  But, with an eye firmly on the final goal, which I am certain will amply recompense for the work, effort and budgeting of the last few years, I embarked on making sure that I could make ends meet.

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Firstly there is an annual cost of enrollment of £1500.  This covers all your submissions and any resubmissions of that year and of course, is the first cost you must be sure to be able to meet.  You might want to think about how much time it will take for you to complete the training.  5 - 6 years seems to be a standard sort of time frame for this and worth keeping in mind, because this is not a short term commitment.

Next there is the cost of supervision.  This is typically around £80 per hour for face to face contact and around £40 per hour for non-contact time, such as reading through and assessing your work.  The training requires you to ensure that you demonstrate a minimum of 4 hours per month of supervision spread out between your designated supervisor and your co-ordinating supervisor.  If you are in a position at your work to be able to complete any expemplars, it is possible for your manager in your work place to also be your designated supervisor, and this would certainly reduce the cost.  If you are in a particularly advantageous position, you may find that your work place will also be able to supply you with a co-ordinating supervisor and in this way you will have no supervision costs..  I was fortunate enough to have one out of the two and so my supervision costs were not as great as they might have been.  The costs will vary from month to month - some months you will need more face to face time, some months less, and the same for non-contact time.

Photo by Serge Bertasius courtesy of www.FreeDigitalPhotography.net

So how to meet those costs.  Work is the obvious answer, but not just because it will supply you with a regular income.  Where you work may be crucial to keeping costs down.  Not only could your work place provide you with some if not all supervision opportunnities, but there may be numerous projects or work products that could provide material for exemplars, and your work place may want your developing skills enough to susidise the cost.  Another obvious usefulness of the work place will be whether you are able to work overtime at least on some occasions to add to the income that you can dedicate to meet those costs.

Photo by Serge Bertasius Photography courtesy of www.FreeDigitalPhotos.net

It is possible to borrow money - perhaps through a personal loan, or possibly a professional development loan, both of these from banks and the usual lending institutions.  It may also be possible to obtain funding from bursaries or research or charitable institutions that want to invest in chartering psychologists, although in general I found that these believed that  having reached Masters level, the career had been achieved.

Photo by stockimages courtesy of www.FreeDigitalPhotos.net

One of the ways I found it possible to boost my income enough to meet my commitment to pay for my training was by tutoring students during after work hours.  Having attained masters degree level you can tutor students who are on undergraduate courses.  However, I find that the greatest demand for private tutoring is from A level students - or rather, their parents.  Tutoring is not reliable regular income, and most interest comes in the period January to June (from the time of the mocks to the actual A level!), but it certainly helps tremendously.  This is a tough option, because not only are you working and preparing your submissions, but you are  having to include time for tutoring as well as your own life, relationships, families etc.  This option calls for strong time management and I would strongly recommend builidng in a series of breaks to avoid burn out.

Financing the training is as much of a challenge as meeting the requirements of the course.  It involves reasearch, analysis and good time management skills, not to mention skills of persuasion and the sharpness of wit to spot an opportunity for funding or for saving on costs when it comes your way.  

Photo "Piggy Bank" by suphakit73 courtesy of www.FreeDigitalPhoto.net

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

Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net by Ambro

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!