Chartership portfolio submitted!

There are lots of changes happening in my life at the moment, which is why this blog has gone quiet in recent days! Yesterday, I finally submitted my chartership portfolio – hurrah! It’s been pedal to the metal with chartership over the past two months, as I wanted to submit before beginning my new job next week (more on this in a future blog post!).

Step 1: CILIP chartership event

I found the chartership process quite easy and straightforward. I kicked things off first and foremost by attending a CILIP ‘getting started with chartership’ event in London. This event was really useful because we were able to ask experts our fiddly questions, and had the opportunity to look at different example portfolios. I also felt reassured that there were lots of other people in the same boat as I was, and I came away from the session feeling more confident about the process as a whole. I wouldn’t say the event was essential, but it was helpful.

Step 2: PKSB 

I then went away and worked on my PKSB. I was really anxious about this – it’s a horrible document that’s just far too long, with confusing terminology and lots of the points overlap anyway! Luckily I was reassured by the fact that at the chartership event, it was clarified that we only really needed to focus on 6-10 points, and that it was ok to be totally clueless about areas outside our own experience. The Excel spreadsheet version of the PKSB is infinitely more useful and manageable to use than the unwieldy PDF.

Step 3: Mentor

I found it difficult to locate a mentor outside my sector that was close to me geographically, so I decided to widen the net a little and found the lovely and helpful Alison Millis, who is based in Tunbridge Wells – about 2.5 hours away! We got in touch via email and I did visit her once, but beyond that all our communication was done via email. I found the online portfolio system really lends itself to distance mentoring as Alison was able to track changes in my portfolio and offer her comments without too much hassle. Alison helped me to put together an action plan for my chartership and was very responsive and helpful throughout.

Step 4: Professional Development activities (and gathering evidence along the way)

I am quite lucky in that my (soon to be former) workplace is excellent at providing training and CPD opportunities. Senior management gave us 2 hours a month dedicated to chartership discussions, as well as our own training budget. What I found especially useful was the opportunity to participate in the University of Reading’s FLAIR teaching scheme for new academics, which has meant that I am now an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and feel like less of a fraud when delivering teaching and training! I didn’t really have to do a whole lot specifically for chartership – lots of the activities that I used for evidence just came from all the things that I did as part of my job.

Step 5: Putting it all together

I started writing my evaluative statement almost from the very beginning – a really useful piece of advice given to me by Alison. Having the structure outlined, organised according to the evaluative criteria and the PKSB skills I wanted to evidence, was really useful in helping me keep focused in my writing. Also, I am lucky to have had practice with reflective writing during my MA course at Sheffield – thank you Barbara! The VLE is very clunky and not the nicest to use, but I was able to figure my way around it reasonably easily, doing most of my writing in Word and copying things over to the VLE when I’d finished. I didn’t personally need any help but I’ve seen from various forum notifications that the CILIP team are very responsive and helpful, if you do encounter problems.

Anyway, it’s in the hands of the assessors now… fingers crossed!

Lovely wildflowers at the Horniman Museum