Chatting about Chartership

Chatting about Chartership

March 2, 2012, 17:17
Filed under: Chartership, CPD | Tags: action learning, chat, librarians, reflection, Twitter

Last night I tuned into twitter to take part in the 2nd #chartership chat. As for the inaugural session, @joeyanne set up an online archive for all the tweets, so whilst I’ll try to summarise the main points here do take a look if you’re interested to see everything that came up. Scanning down the list, I think we managed around 216 tweets during the hour – not as impressive as last time but still not bad!

The discussion kicked off with some queries about mentoring, and particularly whether a long-distance mentoring relationship can be as effective as one with someone who works nearby. Generally people seemed to feel that as long as regular contact is maintained it doesn’t really matter how far away you are from each other, and email, phonecalls, and Dropbox were mentioned as effective ways to keep in touch.

Some consideration was given to how many training courses you should list in your portfolio – whether you need to list absolutely everything or just a selection of the most relevant – and @CILIPcpd has since confirmed that a selection is best:

The chartership handbook on CILIP’s website was recommended to someone who wasn’t sure where to find information about the process, as was Margaret Watson’s book and the CDG (particularly their portfolio building courses). Backdating evidence and revalidation also briefly cropped up, as did access to sample portfolios.

I’ve personally found it really useful to look at examples of how other people have approached their chartership – several portfolios are available to download from the CILIP website, Bethan Ruddock and Jo Wood have made theirs available online too, and you can also get hold of printed copies from your local Candidate Support Officer. The opportunity to see other portfolios is evidently something we all appreciate, but several people felt that the range available didn’t really cover all sectors, and @CILIPcpd has promised to try to address this. CILIP can only share portfolios with permission, so maybe we should all make sure to grant this once we’ve submitted successfully and ensure an even better selection is available for future candidates!

At this point I was slightly beginning to lose interest as, whilst I was enjoying the chat and contributing where I could, it was focussing on things I already knew about. So, as this was clearly a rather self-defeating attitude, I dropped my own question into the mix:

I was absolutely delighted with the response this received. As I’ve blogged about before, my current approach is haphazard, to say the least, and it appears that I am not alone in having a less-than-perfect system for managing my evidence! Solutions which people seem to be having success with include PebblePad, Dropbox and wikis for storing material, and the iDonethis app and a custom Google Docs form for recording evidence on the go. Some of these were completely new to me, and I will definitely have to set some time aside to look into them and decide which will suit me best.

As well as contributing to these common themes it was really nice to see conversations between individuals going on, especially people offering to help each other out, passing on contact details and recommending colleagues/friends/other tweeps to contact too. As well as providing a forum for discussion and information sharing, these chats are a really good way to ‘meet’ people you otherwise wouldn’t have encountered. At the beginning I wasn’t sure what I would make of it all, and I’m very glad I asked my question, but overall I’d say it was a highly worthwhile way to spend an hour. Like most things to do with chartership, I’m sure everyone had a different experience of the session, and I know mine was much more successful than it could have been because I chose to make an effort to get something out of it. I did think twice about asking my question because I was wondering if people would think I was a bit stupid, but I decided to take the risk anyway.

The next #chartership chat will begin at 18.30 on Thursday March 15th. Following comments that having some kind of main topic or theme to discuss would be helpful, the session will be concentrating on useful tools and techniques for gathering and organising evidence for your portfolio.

I think (hope) I’ve picked up on all the main things we discussed – please let me know in the comments if I’ve missed out anything glaringly obvious! I’d also be really interested to hear about your experience of the session, whether you were asking questions, sharing your thoughts, or just watching it all flash past. Hopefully ‘see’ you at the next one…

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