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Having been a regular CILIP member for several years through the MoD partnership scheme, I decided to work towards CILIP Knowledge Management Fellowship, as I felt it would increase my professional identity and boost opportunities for me...
Due to timing and the ability for three of my team to join
me at UWE which was a great experience for us, I took the UWE KM module from Jan to May 2023. The module was enlightening as it explored potential for organisations to take a more programmatic approach to KM initiatives including improved taxonomies for searchability and discoverability of organisational knowledge Since then, I embarked on KM Fellowship in late 2024 as I felt confident that my substan- tial evidence through my career would give me the basis for the Fellowship registration. An important factor in my decision-making was that the PKSB includes both Knowl- edge and Change Management disciplines with elements of computational sense, strategic thinking and stakeholder influence, all of which were highly relevant in my career to date. I liked the idea that business change can act as an enabling lever to influence KM culture and working practices across my organisation.
The process of enrolling for Fellowship involved me get- ting support from my manager and the opportunity to think about and articulate my motivation towards investing time in Fellowship. Since signing up, I have received great support from CILIP colleagues over the months I have been compil- ing my file. Early in the process I joined a Professional Regis- tration webinar, which gave me an overview of CILIP expec- tations around reflective writing, use of the PKSB for skills auditing and what I needed to file for submission. However, little did I know about the hard graft still to come! I cannot lie, going for Fellowship is not easy or quick. It needs focus, dedication and a high degree of self-reflection and explo- ration of one’s professional journey to present meaningful insights to the assessors. No pain, no gain as they say. On balance, I believe the end reward of achieving Fellowship is well-worth the investment.
The right mentor
I can highly recommend working with a mentor for Fel- lowship. During the early months, I lost a lot of time and momentum as I found it so difficult to know where to start and what to tackle first. The Fellowship Guide gives all the elements needed for Fellowship, but it is through the exper- tise, encouragement and moral support of my mentor that I really made progress. I gained so much from our mentoring conversations because we share a lot of common ground and can identify with each other’s professional challenges and frustrations. I also appreciated my mentor’s common-sense pragmatism and I came away from our meetings with various options to explore, things to consider and ways to improve. The most important aspect of the mentoring sup- port I gained was my recognition that my mentor was giving
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me their valuable time, so I needed to show progress at each of our monthly sessions, so they knew I was taking Fellowship seriously.
Overcoming challenges My first challenge was that I had never been through the registration process before, so really did not know what to expect. Having had my first meeting with my mentor, I started to consider my skills using the PKSB, which is a use- ful tool to self-assess my current and target capability levels, to plan my Evidence Pieces around the skills and achieve- ments I wanted to showcase in my Fellowship Portfolio. I found it difficult to compile my Personal Statement at first, so I decide to focus my attention on drafting a few Evidence Pieces first, which then gave me some inspiration to tell my story through my Personal Statement. It’s trial and error, there’s no single right way, the main thing is to keep writing and fine-tune as you go. My other challenge was getting into the habit of writing reflectively, which was tricky to start with. I had to imagine myself back in the scenario I was discussing and remem- bering how I felt in that moment, to then add my thoughts and feelings on what I could have done differently and what I learnt from the experience. My Professional Registration Support Officer kindly share a guide to reflective writing with me which was a game changer, as there is definitely a technique to doing it well and vocabulary to use that turns description into reflection. I found the Professional Knowledge Skills Base (PKSB) to be very useful to help me consider the skills I have and where to focus my attention, whether developing new skills or refreshing skills that needed to be sharpened. I see the PKSB as the back- bone of Fellowship, as it provided me with the ability to rate my progress on building relevant skills and capabilities from which to build my evidence pieces and personal statement, with that all-important reflective writing.
Pride
My Fellowship journey has been a source of pride to me and has significantly increased my confidence to be able to influence key stakeholders on the value of Knowledge Management with authority. People take you seriously when they know you have Fellowship credentials. We are currently undergoing a major restructuring of our organisation so my intention is to make the most of my Fellowship credibility to ensure KM is high up our priority list during our reorgani- sation. There are a few actions that I would recommend. Firstly, read the Fellowship Guide several times and keep referring
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