Building an Online Training Portfolio

 

The visualisation above shows the process a trainee goes through in training. It includes setting objectives, taking part in activities such as assessments and reviews and reflecting on practice. Needs analysis refers to the part of the process where a trainee looks at what they have achieved so far and thinks about what they might need to do next.

It's with this cycle in mind that we have designed FOM PortfolioBuilder, the online portfolio system for occupational medicine. This article will introduce you to how to use FOM PortfolioBuilder to successfully build your online portfolio of evidence.

Setting Objectives

Your online portfolio contains a Personal Development Plan (PDP) which, when you add them, will contain your PDP Items. Here are some of the functions we have included to help you build your PDP in the online portfolio system.

• Add, edit, delete PDP Items
• Map PDP items to competencies
• Mark PDP Items as complete once they have been achieved
• Comment on PDP items

Your PDP items stay in your active PDP until you mark them as complete and the commenting function is available to both the trainee themselves and anyone who supervises them.

To help you navigate your way around tasks, we have created some step-by-step guides including screenshots. Here is our step-by-step guide on how to add a PDP item and map it to a competency.

Activities

As far as the ePortfolio is concerned, activities can be anything you put in your portfolio. Assessments, reports, meeting notes, reviews and any uploaded documents are given the generic name 'activity'.

We realise that no two training experiences are exactly the same which is why we have included features which help trainees build a successful ePortfolio that is as individual as their training. Once activities have been created, they can be organised using folders, categories, tags & mapping. Here are some useful guides to help you build & organise your specialty training ePortfolio.

• Request a Workplace Based Assessment (WBA)
• Add activities using a proforma or free text
• Map activities to your PDP items and to competencies
• Upload documents already created
• Start a Multi-Source Feedback Assessment (MSF)
• Add an activity as a 'followup' to another activity
• Add a new training level folder
• Request reviews & reports
• Add a career entry
• Tag activities with keywords relevant to you or your organisation
• Categorise activities

Once you have started building your portfolio & organising your activities, the search and filtering features in FOM PortfolioBuilder can be used to find activities easily.

Reflecting

Reflecting on your work is good practice and reflections can be added to the portfolio. To add reflective notes to your portfolio, add an activity, start typing 'reflection' as the activity name and select the reflection proforma from the drop-down box.

Some trainees might want to make a reflection a follow-up to another activity, or indeed do a follow-up from a reflection. To find out how to do this, read our guide add a follow-up activity.

As with all activities, reflections can be kept private meaning they cannot be viewed by supervisors until you want them to. This is ideal when an activity is still in draft format.

GMC guidance on Reflective Practice

Needs Analysis

Deciding on the next steps to take in your specialty training may not be a decision you make alone. It may come as part of reflecting, as part of a review meeting with one of your supervisors or following an ARCP.

The online portfolio system provides you with some tools to facilitate assessing your training needs:

• Reviews - regular supervision meetings, Form R, the ARCP can all be done through FOM PortfolioBuilder, so that you have all the documents you need to make an informed decision as to what your next objectives could be in one place. The follow-up feature can be used to connect relevant activities together to clearly demonstrate that one activity occurred as a result of another.
• The Portfolio Card - the specialty training portfolio card gives you, supervisors & anyone else with responsibility for monitoring the progress of specialty trainees an at-a-glance view of how much evidence you have, and how much of the curriculum you have covered to date. The portfolio card can be found on the dashboard of every trainee's account.

• The Curriculum Coverage page - this gives more detailed information than the portfolio card and shows evidence as it is mapped to a curriculum. This helps trainees and supervisors identify gaps in curriculum coverage and set appropriate targets. The curriculum coverage page can be found on a trainee's activities page.

• The PDP Coverage page - this gives information about how the evidence a trainee has collected satisfies the PDP items they have in their active Personal Development Plan. The PDP Coverage page can be found on the activities page.

A detailed description of the types and levels of evidence required at each stage of training within the spiral curriculum are provided within Section 4 of the FOM Training Handbook.

For updates and advice on FOM Portfolio Builder, follow @FOMportfolio on Twitter