Searching for a supervisor

At an early stage in the training process you are set a challenge:  finding a supervisor.

You might be one of the more fortunate trainees in that your post in your workplace as a trainee forensic psychologist means that you will automatically have a supervisor to take you through Stage 2.  Not everyone is going to find the process this straight forward, so you may need to negotiate through your organisation for a chartered forensic psychologist to provide you with professional supervision.  But there are difficulties involved with this, such as the capacity of the psychologist, the cost to your department for their time and their availability.  

In all job posts you will need to be receiving clinical supervision from a manager, you may also arrange to have peer supervision which has many benefits for you and other trainees including sharing practice and learning without the appraisal aspects that may be part of clinical supervision.  Clinical supervision is about your work and can be undertaken by a manager but in order to charter you need a coordinating supervisor who is a chartered forensic psychologist.  Managers or clinical supervisor can be named as your designated supervisor for particular pieces of work and this counts towards your 4 hours of supervision a month but you need to have at least 2 hours supervision a month with your coordinating supervisor who will need to be a chartered forensic psychologist.

 If you decide to find an independent supervisor to be your coordinating supervisor you will need to contact Alex Johnson, the Qualifications Officer at the DFP.  Alex has a list of current supervisors and their contact details so that you can start canvassing for supervision. The only thing the list doesn't provide is information on whether the supervisors have any current availability. Whilst some chartered forensic psychologists do not take on independent trainees as they feel we are unable to get the experience, many others see the benefits of having independent trainees not just as an extra source of income but as essential to the development of the wider forensic psychology arena.

I also made sure to note what areas they had experience in and where they worked as it helps to have a supervisor who holds the same interests in forensic psychology as you do, for example, if you do not agree with the prison system and do not want to work in that setting, you want to look for a supervisor who perhaps has experience of secure units, police or community work. Furthermore, if your interest is in the courts and eye witness testimony etc, you may find a supervisor who has only worked with offending behaviour and mental health more difficult to work with. On the other hand, a good supervisor may be able to support you despite your differences in interests.

Trying to secure a supervisor is very similar to sending your CV out for a job. You have to sell yourself. It can take some time between finishing your masters and securing a supervisor.  Supervisors will then want to know what you have been doing in the mean time to keep your skills sharp, to gain experience and to continue your professional development. 

This is where volunteering and placements can come in handy and if you need help in organising and logging your continued professional development (CPD) then the BPS have a great CPD site on their main website which allows you to keep a record of your CPD, your learning and your reflections. 

British Psychological Society



It can be hard to know what it is supervisors are looking for in order to sell yourself to them, SO, I asked my supervisor what she looks for and what she thinks other supervisors look for in a trainee. 

Essentially she feels supervisors are looking for people who are motivated and able to work independently; supervisors are there to advise and guide and it is made very clear that you will be doing the work for yourself. You will need to demonstrate a high degreel of organisation so that a supervisor can be certain that you are capable of working at this level. She agreed that a variety of experience is also helpful even if it is voluntary work. 

She did add another useful point.  As with any job or placement, demonstrating that you are mature and professional in your approach to securing a supervisor can make the difference between being accepted and not, so a strong CV and cover letter stating your intention for supervision, what stage your are at with your CPD and training and where you want to go in the future are a must.  

The independent route to chartership does have one special difficulty and this is associated with supervision, and that is finance.  Unless your workplace will fund this training, you will have to fund supervision yourself. 

Supervisors costs vary but are usually between £50 - £100 an hour, and half again for marking work that you send to them. Ouch.

Ok, deep breath, don't panic. You only need to see your supervisor for 4 hours a month once you are enrolled on Stage 2.  Furthermore, it can take up to a year to do all the preparation and have your application completed and approved and you won't need to see your supervisor for 4 hours a month during that time. It is once you are enrolled that you must see a supervisor for 4 hours a month.  However, this can include a designated supervisor who is overseeing your examplar work at your placement or in your workplace. S

For example, if you are doing a placement with a college for one of your exemplars then someone has to be named your designated supervisor and you can see this person for 3 out of the 4 supervision hours a month, saving you a bit of money. A word of caution, your coordinating supervisor is there to make sure that your work is up to standard and to ensure that you are practising appropriately, therefore if they feel at any point that you are struggling then you will need to see them more often. This isn't a bad thing and can only help to improve your practice and the likelihood of passing your exemplars first time.  For some ideas and tips about funding, see my blog post of:

Money Matters for Training Success

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.