Please see below for some additional tips to help gain the skills and knowledge you need to apply for the relevant accreditation. Please note these are suggestions and may only be relevant to some areas of work.
General
- Read the article from TA107, Summer 2019, ‘Taking control of your future: making the most of opportunities to expand your career horizons’
- Speak to your line manager and/or colleagues about mentoring and/or support with training opportunities to help improve your technical knowledge for the application
- Join the relevant CIfA Special Interest Group for training opportunities and to network with colleagues to help increase your knowledge and understanding
- Ensure you can demonstrate the competence required for the grade across all areas you work in, e.g. if you undertake fieldwork but also write Buildings Archaeology reports
Member (MCIfA)
Where relevant, find opportunities to
- lead on projects that are more complex in order to demonstrate autonomy and complexity in full
- liaise with external people in a quality assurance role
- gain more complex examples of work to help demonstrate the broad range of activities you are involved in
- review other companies/archaeological reports on Oasis to see good practice examples; this can help to improve your report writing skills to ensure the results are presented correctly, terminology and style is correct and that the relevant CIfA Standards and Guidance or other legislation is referred to. See CIfA DBA Standard and guidance www.archaeologists.net/codes/cifa.
- update your skills to help support your professional development and increase your knowledge to be able to demonstrate complexity and perception of context
Associate (ACIfA)
Where relevant, find opportunities to
- carry out more complex and wider-ranging work which will help you meet the four areas of the competence matrix
- write reports for publication, where relevant
- to learn about specialist work, where relevant
- produce some wide-ranging examples of work
Practitioner (PCIfA)
Where relevant, find opportunities to
- work on more extensive projects to gain further understanding of how projects are run to help meet coping with complexity criteria
- find opportunities to speak to your site supervisors to understand more about how your role fits into the project as a whole to help meet perception of professional contect criteria.
