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BPS updates

Continuing on our member journey

Despite being unable to hold face-to-face meetings, our member journey project has been continuing and we now have more than 30 different areas of work we are planning for.

26 June 2020

By Karen Beamish

I’m delighted that our Board of Trustees accepted the member journey report, and that our Membership Board will now be taking our strategic priorities forward once it starts meeting next month, chaired by Carol McGuinness.

The project is dealing with some big themes. I’ll be able to share more with you throughout the rest of this year, but it includes merging the society review with the parts of the project looking at member networks, meaning that we can move forward with the long-awaited review of our networks.

We want to move towards reviewing and providing clarity around our member grades, and do significant work to raise the profile and status of BPS membership.

One significant area of interest for us is our student members – we want to really add to the benefits that they’re currently getting as members of the society through enhancing our careers advice and developing a dedicated careers portal for our student members.

I want to say a big thank you to everyone who has contributed to the member journey project so far. Every single contribution to an interview, survey, workshop, focus group or meeting has been vital, and both the BPS and our partners The Social Kinetic are extremely grateful for them.

I also want to thank our Board of Trustees for creating the opportunity for this extensive piece of work to happen. It’s opening up a world of opportunity to transform our offer to members – watch this space!

Elsewhere in the membership directorate, we’ve had a fantastic response to our call for webinar proposals from members.

Our Professional Development Centre delivered nine live webinars and one recorded webinar during May and June, with more than 230 people joining in overall, and have an ongoing programme with more than 45 webinars planned over the next couple of months.

There’s still time to submit further proposals on any area of psychology – the deadline for these is 3 August, and we’re excited to see what further ideas you send in.

The team has also been group testing two new professional development offerings that will be available later in the year. One is on supervision skills (linked to RAPPS), and one is on ethics.

I’m looking forward to virtually seeing some of you at BPS Conference 2020 next week. We’re really excited about our first ever digital BPS conference, following the success of our Special Group in Coaching Psychology’s digital conference on 31 May. We welcomed more than 400 delegates to that event, and it’s given us a great blueprint for the future of online BPS events.

We’ve got an exciting line-up of speakers and it’s being hosted by the brilliant Claudia Hammond – if you want to join us 30 June and 1 July, there’s still time to secure a place.

Finally, I know that many of our student and academic members will be concerned about the impact that Covid-19 is going to have on the new academic year. We’re looking to work with the Royal College of Psychiatrists and other organisations to explore how we can best support you and your wellbeing.

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