Supervision and the provisional period
Supervision and the provisional period
After successfully completing the theory component of the Financial Mentor Introductory Course (FMIC), supervision and the provisional period are vital components in the training of financial mentors.
Roles in community health and wellbeing can be intense and require confidence, knowledge and skills in working with a range of clients.
The provisional period provides guidance and support to enable provisional financial mentors to gain confidence in the role and meet the competency requirements before working with clients by themselves.
Completing the provisional period is the final part of the overall FMIC programme and micro-credential requirements.
Once signed off by your manager and supervisor, you will be awarded the Certificate of Achievement and gain recognised financial mentor status.
What is the provisional period?
The provisional period enables you to embed the knowledge, skills, and strategies of financial mentoring into your practice while working with clients in a supported environment. Supervision must be provided by a trained supervisor.
Ideally a supervisor is appointed when the trainee financial mentor starts at the service and can continue right through to after the provisional period. Supervisors generally provide an ongoing mentoring relationship.
The provisional period is 10 out the 16 credits of the FMIC micro-credential, which accounts for at least 100 hours of learning.
Your supervisor will support and guide you to embed the range of skills needed to ensure best practice in delivery. This is done within a reflective practice framework.
Reflective practice
Reflective practice is the ability to reflect on one’s actions so as to engage in a process of continuous learning.
Reflective practice considers:
- what went well and why it went well, in sessions with clients, so these techniques and skills can be used again
- what did not go well and why it didn’t go well, so you can make adaptations and changes to their service delivery.
In FMIC this is taught through reflective practice models by Gibbs and Kolb.
Community Heart
Community Heart is an online learning platform for the community sector. After being awarded the FMIC Certificate of Completion, provisional financial mentors get automatic access to the platform and are able to complete other modules in their own time.
FinCap uses Community Heart to deliver online training courses. Once you have access to Te Papa Hou, you will be able to take advantage of other scheduled learning opportunities.
Accessing Community Heart
You can only be registered onto the FinCap section of the platform through FinCap. Financial mentors will get an automated email from Community Heart with login details, instigated by the FinCap workforce development team.
When we issue the FMIC Certificate of Completion, we automatically hook the mentor on to Community Heart. If you have any difficulties initially getting access, please contact training@fincap.org.nz.
Te Papa Hou
We will also connect you to Te Papa Hou, FinCap’s knowledge base for financial mentors. Read more about getting access to Te Papa Hou.
Te Papa Hou offers access to articles, resources, professional development events and discussion forums.
Through Te Papa Hou you can also access PDable, our professional development tracking platform that enables you to record your ongoing learning journey.
What to do if you lose your certificate
All programmes completed by participants through FinCap are recorded on our database. All participants receive certificates for each programme they complete including those on Community Heart which can be printed directly from the platform.
Those who complete the FMIC receive a certificate of completion and a certificate of achievement on completing their provisional period. These certificates and other training information is held by FinCap. If you have lost your documents or want to know what you have completed, contact training@fincap.org.nz
Certificates for professional development not provided through FinCap should be kept on record with your service.