CPD - ABOUT THE PROGRAMME
How the Qualification Works
Proving Competence
This qualification is composed of Units made up from national occupational standards. It is achieved by a process of evidence gathering to prove your competence in certain professional areas, as described in detail by the Core and Optional Units.
Evidence can be in one, or a combination of, a number of different forms. What constitutes evidence and how it is gathered is described in the next section.
Assessment - how competence is judged
Evidence is judged to be sufficient or currently insufficient, to meet the specified criteria, by professional Assessors.
At the time of Assessment you will be asked to present your evidence, which will have been planned thoroughly beforehand with your assessor, and your assessor will judge the evidence against the set criteria, decide whether it meets all the criteria and provide feedback to you.
If there are any gaps you will be advised accordingly to enable you to gather more evidence as required.
Remote Assessment
This is most often carried out where the learner cannot physically attend an assessment but is also employed when evidence can be easily assessed without the learner being present and where feedback can be, or needs to be, provided asynchronously, ie not at the time of the assessment.
The most common form is e-mailing documentary evidence or text files to an Assessor, or posting them onto shared web-space. Discussion groups and on-line Q&A sessions are also used frequently where appropriate (eg when assessing underpinning knowledge and understanding).
Evidence of competence What is evidence?
To demonstrate you can perform to the standards described (ie competently) you must provide evidence from your workplace. This is evidence of both your performance (ie things you do) and your knowledge and understanding of the particular work you are doing.
This can take a variety of forms as described next.
Core evidence
Evidence can be compiled and presented in a variety of forms. The most appropriate for the CPD Scheme is the variety of evidence associated with critical incidents.
The critical incident will provide the main source of all your evidence and will be presented for assessment in the form of a reflective account.
The Critical Incident Reflective Account
The structured reflection on critical incidents (as described above) provides the core of your evidence. The reflective account is divided into sections that cover each of the Core Units. Each section is divided into:
- How your performance (in the critical incident) made a contribution to each occupational area (eg Working with Others or Creating a Climate Conducive to Learning).
- What evidence you are providing to support this and where it is located.
Evidence of performance during a critical incident Evidence of how you performed during the period covered by the critical incident can include a mix (or all) of the following.
Product evidence
This can be physical objects resulting from your activity. Can include documents such as memos, reports, minutes of meetings, computer files, products resulting from processes or designs for these products, and photographic, video or audio tape record of activities.
Personal statements
These are written or oral records of your activities. A personal statement gives you a chance to provide a detailed explanation or evaluation of your work.
Witness statements
In some situations it is most appropriate for other people to provide statements that support your skills and knowledge in areas of your work. This is particularly useful when evidencing one-to-one interaction (e.g. negotiating or customer services) or to corroborate your performance (i.e. to say that you did indeed provide such and such a service or do such and such and such an activity).
Supervisor's/Line Manager's evaluation and comments
As part of your reflective account of a critical incident, your Supervisor or Line Manager needs to provide a short report based on what you have written about the critical incident. The report should:
- Comment on the validity and accuracy of your reflective account
- Provide key pointers to how you performed across the period of the critical incident
- Offer comments concerning the evidence you have provided in terms of validity, relevancy and confidentiality
Other forms of evidence
Professional Discussion
This technique is one of the most powerful and probing techniques to determine if you meet he necessary requirements for each unit. Professional Discussion (PD) can be used alongside all other forms of evidence to fill-in gaps, can be used very successfully to probe underpinning knowledge and understanding, and can be used stand-alone to examine your competence in all aspects of complete units or parts thereof.
PD takes the form of a guided interview on agreed evidence topics. PD is conducted by a qualified Assessor at the time of assessment so needs some planning and negotiation with the learner. The Assessor will ask the learner to discuss the pre-arranged topics and may ask to see supporting evidence such as computer files, documents, equipment, notes or manuals.
Where PD is used to provide substantial evidence of competence the assessment will be recorded and referenced accordingly to enable its use in other parts of your qualification (or indeed in other qualifications). A record of the topics of PD is always made by the Assessor to show what has been covered and what requirements have been met.
The record of the PD constitutes the most valuable evidence of competence and needs to be fully referenced as part of your qualification.
Product evidence
This can be physical objects resulting from your activity. Can include documents such as memos, reports, minutes of meetings, computer files, products resulting from processes or designs for these products, and photographic, video or audio tape record of activities.
Personal statements
These are written or oral records of your activities that support other forms of evidence. An personal statement gives you a chance to provide a detailed explanation or evaluation of your work.
Witness statements
In some situations it is most appropriate for other people to provide statements that support your skills and knowledge in areas of your work. This is particularly useful when evidencing one-to-one interaction (e.g. negotiating or customer services) or to corroborate your performance (i.e. to say that you did indeed provide such and such a service or do such and such and such an activity).
Observation
An Assessor directly observing you perform an activity is a powerful form of evidence but can be very difficult to apply in some circumstances (e.g. in many interactions having an assessor present may adversely alter the dynamic of the event or distort your performance). Working with equipment and computers, basic administration and some other tasks are often ideally suited to direct observation.
Previous achievement
You may already have a formal record of your achievement (such as a certificate) in some areas of your work. This can be taken into account when looking at the requirements for this qualification. The next section addresses this more fully.
Gathering the Evidence
Using critical incidents
The case studies show that evidence can be gathered using a wide range of work-related activities. However, making sense of it all is another matter. You need to match evidence against criteria that are measures of your skills and knowledge. This is by no means an easy task and the volume of information you might have available to you through work-related activities can be enormous.
A very effective way around this is to use ‘critical incidents’. These are discrete activities within a work-related setting that you can identify as demonstrating your competence and personal development. Because most jobs involve a high proportion of mundane activity, the ‘critical incident’ approach allows you to show well you can perform in more specialised situations.
Critical incidents are, thus, those that distil all that you have learned about yourself from your experiences and requires you to reflect on how you translate this into a specific activity. The critical incident usually comprises a number of different, co-ordinated tasks which themselves can often comprise a matrix of cross-linked events.
The diagram below represents one such critical incident a technician may encounter, assisting and advising students with the design and construction of apparatus.
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