Professional Practice and Research update

Pauline Willis & Clare Huffington, Co-Chairs, SGCP PPR

It has been a hectic year for all of the SGCP committee members and in response to the nature and type of services our members are interested in we have set up two subcommittees to share the workload. One of these is the Professional Practice and Research Subcommittee (PPR) and we will be providing regular updates on our main activities through The Coaching Psychologist.

Subsequent to advertising for new committee members in the last edition, we have enough main committee members and this small team will be responsible for coordinating the activities of a series of working parties who focus on producing specific documents and outputs and ensuring that all of the work conducted through this committee is in line with the broader strategic aims and objectives of the SGCP.

We are now keenly on the lookout for SGCP members who are interested in being involved in ‘working parties’ and this is good route to follow if you are interested in taking on a more active role on the PPR subcommittee as future vacancies become available. Getting involved with these working parties is also recognised as supervised continuing professional development so if you have a specific area of interest that is not covered in our workshop programme then taking part in a working party may be viable alternative for sourcing appropriate advanced professional development activities. Most of our work is conducted ‘virtually’ via telephone conferencing, e-mail and our online discussion forum which means that we are able to work in a time and cost-efficient way.

Although we are committed to working as a ‘virtually’ as much as possible, face-toface opportunities for us to meet and work together will also be created and will coincide with bigger events such as conferences. The first of these will be at the annual conference in December where Pauline Willis will run a workshop to explore the work being done around coaching psychology competencies as well as consulting the membership about their ideas for the professional practice guide. Detailed information about our work is covered under the topic headings below.

As you will see from the summary reports below we have all been very busy in the short time since the committee was established and the workload is likely to increase next year as we have a range of important projects to progress that are of great interest to our members. So please do get involved in whatever way you can either through our online consultations via the SGCP discussion list, participation in one of the working parties lead by our committee members or simply by attending relevant workshops and feedback sessions run at our annual conferences.

Full article: Volume 1, Issue 2 pages 34 - 37