The internet can be a valuable tool when it comes to your Continuing Professional Development, particularly through the use of social media sites. It greatly facilitates expanding your network and keeping on top of industry developments.

If you are looking for ways to network online, there are a number of sites that I am sure you are all aware of:

• LinkedIn.com is a popular choice of site for professional networking. You should fill out your profile with your work history, skills and interests as you would on your CV. You can include a link to your profile in your email signature or on letters so that new contacts can find out more about you if they wish. Build your network by inviting friends, work colleagues and university alumni. Through them you can be introduced to other professionals working in areas similar to your own.

• Twitter has strong networks in many career areas where you can follow professionals in their day-to-day working life.

• Sites like Facebook and MySpace are more informal environments, useful for maintaining contacts with university friends and personal contacts as they too become professionals. Some graduate recruiters will have pages on there for you to ask questions about their graduate schemes. While valuable on a social level, pay careful attention to privacy settings and regularly review the content on your pages to ensure it matches your professional image.

• Discussion Boards and forums can also be helpful. The websites of professional bodies often have forums relating to their particular companies, and you can find active discussion groups within LinkedIn.

Whilst the emphasis on these kinds of website often focuses on networking, be aware that they are also an invaluable source of information. LinkedIn’s forums will be the obvious place to start when checking on what people are talking about in your industry. Since the information is online, it is likely to be far more recent than anything published in print.

Twitter can also be a great tool for keeping up to date with recent developments.  Think of it as a highly focussed newspaper, tailored only to your industry, that collates links to articles from around the web so you don’t have to track them down yourself. (This may involve setting up an exclusively professional account if you are easily distracted, or you can use its list function to group together accounts relevant to your industry in order to filter out any other feeds that you follow.)

The potential of social media to expand the reach of your network, to facilitate access to new information and simply to save time makes it something very much worth further investigation if you have not already had the chance.

The concept of ‘reflective learning’ lies at the heart of Continuing Professional Development. Just as Socrates believed that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’, it is widely held that CPD is nowhere near as effective if there if it is not reflected upon methodically.

In essence, ‘reflective learning’ is simply asking yourself the question: ‘What did I get out of this?’ This does not necessarily have to refer to activities that were specifically related to CPD, but anything that you do in your working (or even extra-working) life. By thinking about what you have learnt from past activities, it is possible to apply new ideas and skills to what you will be doing in the future, whilst also identifying areas of your work that you need to spend more time developing. Moreover, it helps identify opportunities that might have opened up given what you have learnt.

It also enables you to assess how you learn best. This is particularly important, as it develops your self-knowledge about how to stay motivated – an essential part of learning efficiently.  In this way, your CPD can gather real momentum.

Reflective learning is most effective when it is treated as a principle to carry around with you wherever you go – a default response to whatever situations may arise. However, during a busy working day it is often hard to keep an idea like this in the forefront of your mind. This is why it is often suggested that your Continuing Professional Development should be logged in a learning journal.

Everyone has their own preference in how they like to engage with new ideas, but spending a little time keeping a journal can really clarify the seeming chaos of a working day into discrete achievements. Writing is a process that necessitates reflection and the articulation of ideas that can be hard to pin down, and often if it is taken up as a habitual activity you will automatically start thinking of what to write before you start writing.

You will be amazed by what a difference this process will make, and how much control it gives you over your own personal growth. Ultimately it will help you gain confidence, focus and pragmatism in addressing your long-term career goals, cope with change by constantly updating your skill set, and be more proactive in filling gaps in your knowledge and experience.

Whilst a conventional interview will mainly focus on you describing your strengths, you may also get thrown this question: ‘what is your main weakness?’ It is likely that this will be followed up with something about what you do to counteract this weakness.

Being aware of what you can naturally do well and what you need to work harder at is an important and useful bit of self-knowledge. This extends to getting to know what you are like as a person. There are two main ways of doing this – the Five Factor Model and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).

The ‘Big Five’ uses the following classifications, numerically rating an individual on each one:

• Openness (inventive/curious – consistent/cautious)
• Conscientiousness (efficient/organized – easy-going/careless)
• Extraversion (outgoing/energetic – solitary/reserved)
• Agreeableness (friendly/compassionate –  cold/unkind)
• Neuroticism (sensitive/nervous – secure/confident)

And the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, based on the theories of Jung, judges someone’s tendencies on four spectrums:

• Extraversion (focusing on the outer world) – Introversion (focusing on your inner world)
• Sensing (focusing on basic information) – Intuition (focusing on interpretations of information)
• Thinking (making decisions based on logic and consistency) – Feeling (making decisions based on the people involved and the uniqueness of the situation)
• Judging (preferring to decide on things as soon as possible) – Perceiving (preferring to leave things open to new information and options)

If you are interested, you will be able to find a range of tests online for these characteristics. Once you understand what you have, you can start working with your strengths and improving on your weaknesses. At The Careers Group, we run MBTI sessions, which involve taking the personality test and then an hour’s session with a careers adviser assessing the results. Please get in touch for more information.

The C2 office will be closed for the Easter Holidays between Thursday 28^th March and Tuesday 2^nd April.

From all of the team at C2, Happy Easter.

How can you measure what you read?

I’m sure many of you would agree that you can often learn more a lot more from reading than from attending a training day.  However, when it comes to CPD, recording what you have done is important if your organisation or professional body takes your development seriously. This can be relatively simple when it comes to courses, but not so with reading.

Recording your development activities is particularly important if your organisation specifies ‘structured’ CPD as a necessity. ‘Structured’ means that whatever activity you have undertaken has been selected due to a specified learning need, and that its outcomes have subsequently been reflected upon and evaluated.

A neat tool was launched by the FT Adviser in November to facilitate reading as a measurable structured CPD exercise. Their new CPD Tracker helps financial advisers meet the requirement to have 21 hours of structured CPD each year.

Here’s how it works. The CPD Tracker is integrated into the FT Adviser website. Firstly, a professional can chose and read articles that fulfil the criteria of their learning need on the website. Once finished, the tracker allows the reader to answer a questionnaire that tests their understanding of the article and then provides a statement that outlines why they chose the article and what it has taught them. Each CPD-related article will be worth at least 30 minutes and up to a maximum of 60 minutes structured CPD time. This is recorded by the tracker, allowing the hours to contribute to an adviser’s annual 21 hour requirement.

Not all industries have such an accessible way of doing this, but the idea of the CPD Tracker raises some interesting ideas about how it might be useful to approach reading for the sake of professional development. How much do you reflect upon the trade-related articles that you read? Do you think about how it might apply to your CPD? Do you make notes? Do you target your reading based on your learning objectives? These are all worth considering, and may open up a fresh approach to your professional development.

In early March I visited the Putney Animal Hospital, an RSPCA practice that combines welfare with commercial practice, albeit for clients with a low income. Here is what I found out!

I met with Miranda Luck, the Clinical Manager who has a fascinating background having started her career as a human nurse before becoming a veterinary nurse. She reflected upon how many career options there are for vet nurses now in diverse areas such as pharmaceuticals, practice management and consultancy. With the issues that can come with manual handling (even with excellent health and safety procedures!) it’s important to know that these avenues are there for you if you decide to move away from practice in its standard form.

The Putney Animal Hospital is one of a number of RSPCA veterinary practices in London, providing services for clients who can’t afford average private veterinary fees. The criterion to become a client of the hospital is a household income of not more than £25,000 per year. Increasingly this has come to include clients who have been affected by the recession through redundancy.

We discussed some of the generalisations that people make about all welfare practice work which she believes is having an impact on the recruitment of veterinary nurses. She currently employs a lot of locum nurses but wants to recruit more permanent nurses.

These are the untrue generalisations she has identified;

• Welfare practices don’t pay as well as private practices: her experience working in welfare and private practices has shown her that this isn’t true.
• The range of treatments used is less at a welfare practice than at a private practice: if anything, because of the range of exotics and wildlife as well as the small animal (on the tour of the practice I saw a pigeon) you’d get to use a broader range of treatments than at an average practice. The one caveat to this is that they do tend to use fewer branded drugs.
• You get to do less surgery at a welfare practice: she believes they do more surgery than at your average practice because there is no spending limit per animal. Once a client is accepted as meeting the criterion the sky is the limit in terms of the amount of treatment.
• You put lots of animals to sleep: of course if it is necessary you do but because there is no spending limit once an animal is accepted as a patient this no more common at RSPCA practices than it would be elsewhere. At this point I asked whether this was the case for all welfare practices (E.g. – Blue Cross and PDSA) and the answer was not necessarily. For example PDSA restricts the number of pets a client can have treated to 3 so if they bring a 4^th pet this can’t be treated. All welfare centres have different policies so this is a good thing to look into!
• The quality of care is not as good at a welfare practice: interesting she drew a parallel between this stereotype and a similar one for NHS Vs. private healthcare (which is equally untrue!). They operate a 24 hour hospital and have their own lab so test results can be analysed immediately.

So once we had dismissed the negative stereotypes we moved onto discussing what it’s like to work as a veterinary nurse at Putney Animal Hospital;

• They employ 30 nurses (and 8 vets)
• You get accommodation. I saw the flats above the practice and they looked nice and modern – one was even in the process of being decorated
• The night’s rota is 1:8.
• The high volume of clinical cases and the fact that employ dedicated receptionists means that you have the opportunities and time to focus on developing your clinical skills (in private practice it can fall to the nurse to do the insurance forms and book appointments). She told me about a nurse who had been in practice for 5 years before coming to the Putney Animal Hospital but hadn’t had the opportunity to become confident in lots of clinical skills – after a short period with them she was able to move onto a Head Nursing role elsewhere. She feels that a year there is worth 3 years of experience in private practice!
• The clients are really grateful which creates a feel good atmosphere. When I was there I saw the common occurrence of a man donating unwanted pet food.

Interested?

Miranda is particularly looking for newly qualified vet nurses – check out her Facebook page. If you are interested in welfare work generally she is also happy to refer you onto Bluecross and the PDSA so get in touch with her.

‘Running swiftly, balancing on the razor’s edge, bald but with a lock of hair on his forehead, he wears no clothes; if you grasp him from the front, you might be able to hold him, but once he has moved on not even Jupiter himself can pull him back: this is a symbol of Opportunity, the brief moment in which things are possible.’

-          from Aesop’s fables

It is a truism that however hard you work, or however talented you are, chance has an equally, if not more, influential effect on your career path. One could draw a rather disheartening conclusion from this: why try when success is so often determined by luck? But fortunately, luck isn’t as elusive and haphazard as you might think.

Richard Wiseman, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, conducted a ten-year study on the nature of luck, eventually publishing his findings in his book The Luck Factor. It provides an enlightening view of why some people seem to be especially lucky in their careers and lives in general. Here is a particularly interesting anecdote:

‘Barnett Helzberg Jr. is a lucky man. By 1994 he had built up a chain of highly successful jewellery stores with an annual revenue of around $300 million. One day he was walking past the Plaza Hotel in New York when he heard a woman call out, “Mr. Buffett” to the man next to him. Helzberg wondered whether the man might be Warren Buffett – one of the most successful investors in America. Helzberg had never met Buffett, but had read about the financial criteria that Buffett used when buying a company. Helzberg had recently turned sixty, was thinking of selling his company, and realized that his might be the type of company that would interest Buffett. Helzberg seized the opportunity, walked over to the stranger and introduced himself. The man did indeed turn out to be Warren Buffett, and the chance meeting proved highly fortuitous because about a year later Buffett agreed to buy Helzberg’s chain of stores. And all because Helzberg just happened to be walking by as a woman called out Buffett’s name on a street corner in New York.’

- Richard Wiseman, The Luck Factor

The point to this story is that being a ‘lucky’ person is simply being good at spotting and taking advantage of opportunities. This was a quality that Wiseman found to be common amongst those in his study who thought themselves to be lucky. There were other common denominators too, such as maintaining a wide network of friends and contacts, and the varying of behavioral habits – taking alternative routes to work, or talking to people who they hadn’t spoken to before. By doing this, they create the perfect conditions to be exposed to a wide range of opportunities. In other words, they make their own luck.

With in mind, the idea of opportunity knocking on the door is misleading in that it suggests a passive wait for something to come along. Wiseman’s study, and Aesop’s fable, suggest quite the reverse: opportunities are fleeting and require a pro-active person to seize them. Incorporate this principle into your professional development plan, and you may be surprised at the extent to which good fortune is in your control.

You can find a summary of the principles of Wiseman’s book here.

The C2 office and Careers Information Library will be closed between Monday 24^th December and Wednesday 2^nd January.

The teams here would like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

With the ever increasing need to provide outstanding benefits and services to members, many professional bodies are now looking to enhance their members experience by providing them with access to career and professional development services. C2 is at the forefront of this trend; having established strong relationships with The British Medical Association, The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals and The Chartered Institute of Marketing, C2 is now proud to be working with the British Veterinary Association (BVA).
The new service was officially launched at the London Vet Show 2012, which also played host to the first ever BVA Careers Fair. Personalised one to one guidance sessions offered by C2 for BVA members were quickly booked up, and a careers talk tailored to the veterinary profession well attended, suggesting this will be an extremely popular and well received offering from the BVA in partnership with C2.

The service C2 provides to the BVA is comprehensive and covers everything from exploring career options and progressing your career to overcoming setbacks and returning to employment after a break. Joanna* a veterinary surgeon was offered a trial phone advice session to assess the service for the BVA. She said:

“I had several ideas turning over in my head but I have been so unsure about a potential change from life in practice that I had been going round in circles… David helped me to recognise this (which was a relief in itself) and to take the pressure off any immediate decisions. He has given me some helpful steps to take in terms of making in-roads into some of the career possibilities that I have been considering. I have been feeling under a lot of pressure at work and have been feeling stuck and frustrated. I feel so much better for speaking to someone experienced about my situation – it has taken away a lot of the fear that I had about a potential change.”

Peter Jones, President of the BVA, said:

“It’s so important that BVA provides services that our members really value and we know that careers advice is high on list. Not every veterinary surgeon wants to take the same career path but we don’t always know what else is out there or have the confidence to take a different route. I’m particularly delighted that the new BVA careers service will be able to offer support in a range of different ways to suit individuals.”

If you want to find out more about setting up a careers service for your members, or just want more information on how C2 can help you, please contact: C2@careers.lon.ac.uk

So you have your eye on that managerial role, but is aiming for it the best option for you and if it is, what might be stopping you from getting it?

It almost seems like a norm of our society that we should whenever and wherever possible try to climb the career ladder and progress into and up through management. For some this may be suitable but for others a different approach might be more satisfying.

Before applying for management positions there are a few key factors you might consider, such as:

Asking yourself if you have the right skills to be a manager.  Have you been properly trained and prepared for the task of managing others?  Do you really want to manage others?

By moving up the career ladder, you will naturally be given more responsibility which may lead to an increased work load. Is this something you are prepared for? 

It’s also important to consider when to go for a managerial role. If you have plans to leave the company in the near future, getting promoted, trained-up and then leaving shortly afterwards might reflect negatively on you.

It’s also important to think about the position being offered. For example has the role seen a line of people come and go in quick succession? If so this could be a warning sign.

If moving into a managerial position is the thing for you then what can you do to ensure that you stand out of the crowd in the right way?

It can be useful when thinking about this to try and step into the shoes of the manager who will be interviewing you for a junior management job. 3 things that they might consider when choosing who to promote might be:

1. Who looks and acts the part.

When they look at the employees in the office, they will be asking themselves: Who takes their work seriously? Who does the bare minimum and who goes that extra mile? Who dresses like they mean business and who pushes the boundaries in terms of what is acceptable appearance wise? If you want to be taken seriously you have to look and act the part.

2. Who is amiable yet respected?

Another aspect being considered is the interpersonal skills of the applicants. Who gets on well will others? Who manages the balance well between being too assertive and not assertive enough in their inter-personal interactions?

3. Who is organised?

The third thing they might be looking for is someone who is organised and who knows how to prioritize well. If you barely manage your own workload now, it is unlikely you will be able to manage yours in addition to somebody else’s. Having a good ability to prioritize is key to being a good manager.

In short just because a managerial position is there, doesn’t mean you should automatically apply for it. A close look at yourself, your current situation and the position itself is necessary first.