For the last twelve years I have been working as the Project and Fieldwork Officer in the Department of Archaeology at the University of York. In this role I fall a little bit between the cracks; I’m not a lecturer but I do a lot of lecturing; I’m not a full-on fieldworker, but I organise student fieldwork, work on academic field projects, and train others in fieldwork techniques. I also spend much of my time working with GIS on advanced spatial analysis, but don’t have responsibility for the systems. As such, I was worried about how I would assess my competency for CIfA, and this was part of the reason I’d put off the application for such a long time. However, after working with colleagues on getting the York degree accredited with CIfA, I thought it was probably about time I bit the bullet. I found that there was no single specialist matrix that was able to adequately represent my role. However, by using a combination of matrices (Academia, Geophysics, Field Archaeology, and Information Management) I was able to establish my competencies, and I found the process pretty useful in documenting my achievements thus far. It’s surprising how much you forget you’ve done until you’re prompted.
