Submission perfection - an eye for detail

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One of the skills forensic psychologists in training need to hone is that of paying attention to detail.  Thoroughness in everything is essential and can range widely, from verifying research sources and accuracy in referencing to ensuring grammar and spellings enhance the meaning of a written piece of work and that argumentation is logical and either supports or disproves a hypothesis.

Submitting a piece of work is sometimes daunting.  Writers talk about submission to publishing houses in terms of sending their babies out to face the world, and your sending in your submission does feel a little similar: you spend months if not longer gestating the idea, researching, developing the hypothesis, developing your research, analysing the results and then writing it up.  At this point, students would be well advised to read, re-read and read again their work.  No-one likes their progeny returned home unloved by the tough world of assessment.  Here are a few tips I have picked up along my road to Chartership:

• In submitting research you need to have a clear rationale for the work and demonstrate in as many ways as possible how you have considered the ethics of the subject matter at hand, and the ethics of how you intend to deal with it.  For example, if you are chartering independently and you do not have an ethics committee to approve your research, you will need to check this with the DFP and submit as evidence anything they respond with about whether the research can go ahead.  I was using social media and Survey Monkey to access participants and use an online questionnaire.  I asked the DFP if there were any ethical issues with this in their policy.  I used their response as evidence of ethical consideration, not only checking my submission would be valid and acceptable, but also enhancing my work.  I also evidenced how I would ensure people remained anonymous online, for example by removing IP addresses from the data downloads.  I gave further evidence in how I gained online consent, how to ensure that participants have read the information and have given informed consent, all issues with ethical ramifications that show you have considered and made provision for all the possibilities.  

•  In analysing data, you need to justify any analysis that you use and you need to provide an adequate depth in the analysis.  For the final write up you should bear in mind that the assessors want to see a report that could be published - you are providing evidence that you can write for non-researchers, such as non-psychologist stake holders.  You may have to write two reports, one of a publishable quality and one a summary of research and outcomes aimed at stake holders.  Trainees have been known to fail on the fact that they did not write for lay persons, or have failed because their final report conversely leaned towards appealing to the stakeholders and was not written with sufficient academic strength.  It is important to her able to separate the two different styles of writing and try retain focus on what is required of each piece. I was one of the trainees who wrote too much for the stakeholders and not enough for publication and so all that was required from me was a bit of editing of language and structure - which sounds simple, but can be time-consuming.

•  One of the requirements of Chartership is that you should demonstrate that you have conducted the research but the challenge in this is that submitting raw data is not acceptable as it could be used to identify your participants.  It is therefore important to apply some creativity in how you do this. Remember, the registrar has to approve it first in your exemplar plan and this should help avoid the situation that you collect lots of data and evidence and the assessors refuse to accept it.  Don't panic, listen to the registrars feedback and apply the advice.

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One  final point; if there is anything in your writing that could possibly identify even an organisation
or location, you will fail.  Be careful about headers, text, coding, letter heads and logos.  Every             identifier must go.

 Above all, once you have submitted, don't let yourself become disheartened by feedback.  The assessors do try to find positive aspects of your submission and they are very clear about what it is they want you to rework and resubmit.  Sometimes they raise what might seem a frustratingly minor point, but this will be part of your learning to be thorough, to cover all angles, as is expected from a professional in any field.  Make sure you have your eye on the fine detail, and success will follow.

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Success in sight....almost.

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At a time when you least think that the going can't get any tougher, it can.  Not insurmountably tough, but there's no point dressing it up in finery.  Gaining Chartership is a testing experience.  It is a test of academic ability, intellectual ability, resourcefulness, creativity, stamina, and, not least, resilience.  The submission of completed exemplars is one of those areas where more than just your ability to gather the evidence necessary to prove you're meeting the standard and string it into words is being tested.  Putting together the submission means applying a multitude of skills, and just as you are beginning to breathe a sigh of relief at having done as much as you thought was necessary to complete everything, the submission comes back at you with stern comments on what you didn't quite get right, or you didn't get right enough.  This is where resilience and determination kick in.

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Firstly, I just want to spend a bit of time reflecting on those fine points of detail in making your submission that can affect how it is received.  You need to ensure that there is nothing confidential that can be identified in any way - there is no option but to be extremely thorough about this.  Just this point alone speaks volume about a trainee's professionalism.  Either remove identities or blank these out.  If posters advertising training events  you are delivering are to be used as evidence, any traces of any identities must be removed e.g. photos.  I'm sure there are readers who will contemplate, as I did, just how reliable evidence that has had all identity wiped clean can be, but it is something that must simply be done. A submission must be sent in duplicate hard copies as well as through an electronic version - the precise details as well as details of what must be signed by your supervisor is on the DFP site.  It is important to make sure you have original signatures because electronic signatures will not be accepted.

Then you wait for the submission to be returned and you will feel varying degrees of confidence almost day by day.  Recieving feedback can be difficult, and this is where resilience kicks in.  The first thing you focus on is whether competence has been demonstrated.  Perhaps it has and you will feel a welter of relief.  That's great.  More commonly, your first attempt - or indeed, early attempts - at submissions will come back with the glaringly harsh comment: "competence not yet demonstrated".  

At first impact the chances are you will move along a spectrum of emotions from outrage, to deep disappointment, to despondency, through despair, and then to grudging acceptance that something was not quite right with it.  I suggest putting it down, brewing a cup of tea and coming back to it once the weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth is over.  Then read it through again because you may find, once you read it all through, that you  have passed all but one or two of the competencies, and then, there may just be some minor issues you have overlooked.  Feedback is there to provide you with a chance to improve that little bit more, to stretch youself those last few inches to reach the summit of your training, so it is worth making the most of it.

Assessors tend to give detailed feedback. Some may be more prescriptive in what they want you to submit and others less so. Once you have read through the feedback, discuss this with your supervisor so that you decide together what is going to be resubmitted in order to cover all the points.  Then you are up and running again.

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Most trainees do not pass their first submission.  But after five or more years working on this, not quite demonstrating competence is a difficult judgement to receive and accept.  In fact, when faced with having to rework a project that was completed perhaps a year or more previously, perhaps with a different employer, perhaps in a different part of the country, the task may seem completely impossible.  However, it is very rare for an assessor to want a submission completely reworked.  Usually there is a detail that is missing or needs further clarification or greater reflection.  Perhaps your practice diary may not be clear or a reference to a piece of evidence may be missing.  Most resubmissions are usually in the form of an additional report to demonstrate a very specific piece of learning, or perhaps another reflective piece, or new practice diary entries to show that you went over your statistical analysis and are content that you chose the right one, for example.  Breaking down the feedback and requirements of resubmission into its component parts will make the pill much less bitter to swallow, and the final stretch will appear that bit shorter.

What may be worth pointing out is that assessors vary in what they like and don't like to see in submissions. Some will compliment trainees on their reflective diaries, some may like a very formal approach, others will want a good deal of supporting evidence while others are less demanding as to quantity.  The best way of dealing with this is to make sure you have unfailingly followed the guidelines and that you have made clear anything that you are not sure about with the registrar.

For many trainees, dealing with some negative feedback and having to do yet more work before reaching the finishing post can be very disheartening.  I have written this from the perspective of someone who has to resubmit some work and I understand intimately the range of emotions that this sparks off.  But proving your professionalism and capabitlities is more than what you put on paper.  It is about taking the knocks, working with them, learning from them, shaking off the hurt and taking those next steps to achieving your goal.  Success is in sight.

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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.