June wasn’t all about work. One day we took some friends from London up to the Blue Mountains to catch the sunrise.

I have decided that it is a good practice to periodically pause, reflect and share with readers of this blog what I have been doing.  I realised back in April that you may be interested in hearing about the things I do which don’t normally appear in my blog posts.  It is also a good practice for me to stop and reflect on the past month and ensure that I remain properly focussed.

My biggest achievement this month has been to finish my Certificate IV in Training and Assessment.  Now I am a qualified workplace or VET trainer in Australia.  The course was more work than I expected, so I decided to drop other activities and concentrate on completing it as quickly as possible.  However, I did it thoroughly.  I not only did the course work in class and at home, but applied it by designing and delivering a CPD session for the Professional Historians Association of NSW and providing coaching in twitter to someone working in public relations. One of the participants has written about the CPD session, Social Media for the Cautious Historian, on the blog of the Professional Historians Association of NSW.

During the course I delivered two sessions drawing on the course, BSBITU401A ‘Design and Develop Complex Text Documents’. We had an eclectic class – people from banking, telecommunications, health, advertising and legal sectors etc.  I did not have access to a computer laboratory to conduct the training, so the participants brought in their laptops.  I had to deliver the training to people who ranged in ability from struggling with basic computer skills to the very competent.  The class was split nearly 50/50 between those using Windows or Mac operating systems.  Delivering the training in these conditions was challenging, but there was a lot of enthusiasm from the participants to learn and I was delighted to hear that some of them had immediately applied their newly learned skills at work.  This is a good sign that the training I delivered achieved its goals.

Now I can combine my skills, experience and qualifications in research, IT, public relations and training to get work in a variety of fields.  Over the next few weeks I will be connecting with my network in order to secure a full-time position.

June wasn’t only about gaining a qualification.  Just a few days ago Reconciliation Australia awarded my blog post, Reflecting on Reconciliation Week 2013, a prize in their Reconciliation Week social media competition.  This occurred on the day of the change of Prime Minister.  Judging by the hits this post received on that momentous day I gather some people were glad for some non-political news! Continue reading →