‘Building your Portfolio’ Career Development Group (West County Division) (16th September – Bournemouth Central Library)
In September I attended the ‘Building your Portfolio’ course organised by CILIP’s Career Development Group. The course was aimed at those interested in CILIP’s framework of qualifications such as Chartership, Certification or revalidation).
The course consisted of the following key topics:
- Learning Styles
- What is reflection
- Choosing your evidence
- Writing skills
- Keeping a learning log
To get us to participate and learn about Chartership and its requirements the course organisers began with introductions and then handed out a Chartership quiz sheet. To quiz was designed to enable us to discover what we already knew about Chartership and what we didn’t. This was a good way to be able to learn about Chartership as we could all be actively involved in the learning process.
The course organisers introduced all of the participants of the course to the basics of reflective writing. Essentially reflective writing shows evidence of reflective thinking and involves aspects such as the following:
- Analysing an event or idea
- Thinking about what it means for you and your progress as an information professional
They also explained evidence for your portfolio and the four key areas of criteria as follows:
1/ Ability to reflect critically on personal performance and to evaluate service performance
2/ Active commitment to CPD
3/ Ability to analyse personal and professional development with reference to experiential and developmental activities
4/ Breath of knowledge and understanding of the wider professional context
Some interesting helpful hints and tips were suggested on how to write up and keep a record of events and training you attend such as taking photos of information at course events and then uploading the images to services such as Evernote. They also suggested that using other services like eportfolio services such as Pebblepad and blogs could also be useful.
The most interesting aspect of the course was seeing examples of other candidate’s portfolios. This was incredibly revealing as the examples that we were able to view ranged in size and also in content. This demonstrated that although essentially the structure of the portfolio may be similar the actual content and types of CPD activities undertaken would differ drastically from person to another.
Overall the course was helpful as an introduction to aspects of portfolio building but I would also recommend reading the following book as a companion piece to this course:
‘Building Your Portfolio The CILIP guide by Margaret Watson’