How to reference your leadership qualification evidence

Last week (I’m trying to get back into the habit of doing these weekly) I talked about gathering your evidence for your leadership qualification and I thought I’d do a very quick chat on the subject of referencing. There are no marks for referencing, no style guide, no “correct” way to do it. All you have to do is make it lovely and easy for your mentor and the verifiers to match up clauses in the book with evidence.

I’ve tried, in my three qualifications, numbering things by which clause they relate to (“M1 P2 a”, for example, for agreeing the programme content with the girls in Module 1 Part 2 clause a) but that gets a little bit more complicated when you’re using the same piece of evidence for multiple clauses, eg the term programme which includes the Five Essentials, the contribution to carrying out the programme, showing how everyone is involved, an activity outside the meeting place and an activity with another unit. But it’s still a perfectly reasonable way of doing it as long as you use the same reference next to all of them. It’s not the reference itself which links the book and the evidence, it’s having the reference in the right place. If your mentor/verifier sees M1 P2 a written against six different clauses, she knows where she has to keep going back to each time and that’s good.

Or you can just number them. 01, 02, 03 and so on up until you reach the end of your evidence and that’s also perfectly good. If you then put your evidence in your folder in numerical order, whoever’s looking through it knows exactly where to find 07 every time it pops up, even if you use it for twenty different clauses – it’s always betwen 06 and 08.

You can order your references in book order or you can order them in the order you do them. Realistically, when you’re working through this qualification, you’re not going to start at the beginning of the book and work through from front to back. You’re going to jump around. Numbering the evidence as it goes into the folder is absolutely fine. Whoever’s looking through doesn’t care if it goes 76, 92, 03, 47, 16 or if it goes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 as long as it’s easy to leaf through the evidence and find those numbers. For that matter, I have no idea why I’ve done it but in my Guide module 1, I’ve started at 2a. 2a to 2g. I wonder where I picked the 2 up from? Well, it doesn’t matter. Mentor and verifier were able to find the evidence for each clause with no problem.

The only minor thing is – when you look at the book, in each signing-off box, you have the clause number, then the reference number, then the space for the signature. My mentor for that particular qualification preferred to re-write the reference number in big letters at the end, on the right, rather than have it squished at the front before the signature. That’s her personal thing but it’s not a bad idea to make your reference really obvious.

That’s really all there is to. Put a number on everything, put a number next to each clause and make sure it’s easy for someone to pick up your folder and match up those two numbers. Don’t make it difficult for your mentor, your verifier or especially for yourself.