E-Portfolios

All health professionals should maintain a continuous, up-to-date and accurate record of their continued professional development. A portfolio is a confidential and voluntary way of collecting material that records events in your professional life. It is also a way of using experiences and activities to demonstrate and reflect on skills learnt.

Your portfolio will:

• Demonstrate that you are maintaining and enhancing your skills.
• Provide evidence to demonstrate your skills, learning, development and competencies.
• Provide a mechanism for analysing your practice by encouraging you to reflect on your experiences.
• Enable you to identify future development needs.
• Act as a reference point for updating your CV, preparing for performance review, for job applications etc.

Why E-Portfolios?

Web-based portfolio systems are an increasingly popular and convenient method of doing this. They allow users to record details of their CPD experiences in a personalised electronic portfolio hosted on the internet. The portfolio is personal to the user and accessed via a secure password so no-one else can view it without thier permission.

• no need to store files of paper based portfolio
• cannot be lost, damaged, destroyed, stolen etc
• easily record CPD experiences with any computer that has internet access
• simple to organise, edit, view and print 
• upload and store evidence of CPD experiences
• share certain aspects of the portfolio with friends, mentors and assessors
• easily produce written documents such as profiles or statements.

CPDspot E-Portfolio

CPDspot has produced an online portfolio system for health professionals that is free to use. MyCPDspot is a place for health professionals to record and share their continued professional development using blogs and social networking tools. This is how it is used:

• Record and tag CPD activities as posts in your own private blog (e.g. courses attended, incidents at work, key research articles etc).
• Upload and store evidence of CPD into your file store (e.g. course attendance certificates, assignments etc).
• Create links within your blog entries (e.g. to evidence in your file store, articles on the internet etc).
• Create attractive online presentations that use your blog entries and evidence for viewing by others (e.g. potential employers, auditing professional bodies etc).
• Discover and make connections with other health professionals through shared blog postings and comments.
• Have a portfolio that you can be proud of!