Online Mentor: User Guide

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Online Mentor: User Guide

We have designed Online Mentor to be intuitive and easy to use. The purpose of this Guide is to highlight a few things that may not be immediately obvious.

Log-in & passwords

Usernames and passwords are case sensitive.

Your initial password is computer generated and, as such, will mean nothing to you. You can change it after logging in via the “Edit My Profile” area.

If you repeatedly enter an incorrect username or password the system will block access to your account for security reasons – if this happens, please contact us and we can unblock your account and reset your username/password.

Contents:

Your ‘Journal’

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Page 2

Adding Journal Entries

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Page 3 - 8

Searching your Journal

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Page 9 - 12

Printing your Journal

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Page 13

The Online Mentor professional skills content

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Page 15 - 16

Supervisors & Managers

Guidance relevant to supervisors and managers is contained within the “Searching your Journal” section.

Your ‘Journal’

When you log in, you can access your Journal area via the “[Your name] Journal” link (in top/middle of the page):

You then have the option of searching your Journal, creating a new Journal entry or going to your Reports Area:

[These links are also located on the left hand side under “Categories”.]

Adding ‘Journal’ Entries

Journal entry options

Depending on the version of Online Mentor you are using, you’ll have up to 5 options when doing a Journal entry - but 90% of the time, you will be choosing “Work done on a file, matter or case”.

However, you can also capture any experience/learning you have obtained from formal “Training or other professional development”.

“Professional conduct/ethics issues” (where applicable) lets you capture any specific experience of conduct or ethics. However, professional conduct/ethics issues can be picked up thematically within “Work done on a file, matter or case” or “Training or other professional development” as appropriate.

If you really want to keep your Journal up to date with absolutely no gaps, we give you the option of logging “Holiday/Illness”.

There is a sweep up option of “Other”, for any entries which you don’t think fall under any of the other headings.

NB: ‘Entry Date’ defaults to today’s date if you leave it blank

This will be fine in the vast majority of cases, so leave the field blank. If you want to change the date (let’s say because the experience you are logging was many weeks or more in the past), you can do this via the calendar icon, or by inputting a date manually using the dd-mm-yyyy format.

In most cases, you don’t need to use the ‘Period Covered’ fields but you can do so if you want to create an entry that spans a particular time period e.g. a weekly summary, or a particular transaction that spanned a period of time.

Work done on a file, matter or case

When you expand “Work done on a file, matter or case”, you’ll see something like this:

Practice Area

This is not a regulatory requirement but is useful for assigning experience to legal practice areas. By assigning a practice area each time you create a Journal entry, you will be able in due course to search the experience you have captured in particular practice areas. Being able to do this would be useful, for example, when preparing for interviews leading up to qualification.

If you are on a version of Online Mentor tailored to your firm, the practice areas will be firm-specific.

Case/File/Matter

Putting an identifier makes it easier to go back to the file if you ever want to amend/follow up a particular entry.

Contentious or Non-Contentious

You must have exposure to both contentious and non-contentious experience during your training contract, so being able to log it is useful.

Work done for/under supervision of

Self-explanatory.

The task/work done

In this field, put a description of what you did. It need not be particularly long or detailed e.g. “Attending client meeting and preparing attendance note”. The length of the entry will obviously vary depending on what experience you are recording.

Reflection/learning points

In this field, note down any reflections about what you did, and what you think you learned or became aware of as a result of that experience. Think also about what you might do better (or differently) next time.

There is no magic formula here in terms of minimum length and there is no SRA ‘minimum’ requirement.

From a learning and development perspective the more you reflect (within reason) on what you did the better, because it is only by reflecting on what they’ve done after they’ve done it that people can raise their levels of self-awareness, and this is a pre-requisite for optimum professional development.

As an example, having said you did some research under “Task done”, the following would not be a true reflection:

“I discovered that there is a lot of case law in this area”.

This is an observation on the amount of case law in this area and tells us nothing about your development as a lawyer. However, the following variation would be a ‘reflection’:

“There is a lot of case law in this area and the decisions tend to turn on the specific facts of the case. I took away from this the importance pinning down exactly what the facts are before attempting to give advice. In this case I went back to my supervisor (and then our client) a couple of times before drafting my research/advice note”

‘Outcomes’

The SRA Training Regulations 2011 require trainees not only to keep a ‘regular’ and ‘adequate’ record of their training throughout their training contract but in addition the training record must evidence engagement/progression against the SRA Practice Skills Standards. (The SRA’s Training Contract Requirements and these Skills Standards are summarised on the Online Mentor website – see the links on the left hand side.)

When adding Journal entries via Online Mentor, you can log your experience against the SRA Practice Skills Standards (or ‘Outcomes’ for short) and/or your Firm’s key performance indicators/checklists (if applicable).

Each time you create a Journal entry and tick a particular Outcome, the system remembers and totals up the number of times you’ve done that:

This helps to show you how you’re doing in terms of exposure against each particular outcome, and helps to flush out gaps or skills where you have relatively little activity recorded. This is useful from a regulatory compliance perspective but also of course in terms of helping you to manage your training and ensure that you obtain experience in the core skills expected of a well-rounded NQ solicitor (which is what the SRA Practice Skills Standards try to identify).

Ticking outcomes and sub-outcomes

When you tick a component of a main heading (e.g. “Chooses appropriate methods of communication” under the main heading “Communication Skills (Oral & Written)”) and submit your Journal entry, the database will automatically recognise that the main heading has also been engaged. In other words, you don’t have to tick both.

We have truncated the wording of some of the longer outcomes by using ellipses (…):

Left clicking on that text will highlight it and bring up the full wording on the right hand side of the page.

File uploads

Depending on the version of Online Mentor you are using, you may have the facility to upload documents as evidence of what you’re saying - whether you do this will depend on your firm’s policy. It is not an SRA requirement. You will need to save any documents onto your PC’s hard drive and then upload from there. The system cannot upload directly from other document management systems.

Submit for assessment or review

There is a tick box labelled ‘submit for assessment or review’. Unless otherwise directed, ignore this button.

The button in effect lets you ‘confirm’ that you are happy that this entry is in a good condition for others in your firm (or, where relevant, outside) to review.

Ticking this box enables you/others to narrow down a search of your training journal to entries where this button has been ticked (this is done via the ‘Advanced Options’ search area – see later).

Adding new Journal entries whilst viewing existing Journal entries

Some users like to be able to view their existing Journal when they are inputting new Journal entries: we suggest you open a new tab within your browser as the easiest way of doing this.

Searching your Journal

Once you have a good number of entries, searching your Journal will become relevant. You can access the Journal Search area from either the “[Your name] Journal” page options or via the Journal Search link on the left hand side of the page under “Categories”:

Your Journal Search area will look something like this:

Note for supervisors and managers [text in italics only]

When supervisors and managers log in, they will see a list of their Firm’s trainees:

Clicking “View” takes you straight into that user’s Journal.

From the Journal view page, you can search the Journal in a number of ways – most of them self-explanatory.

Note that you can comment on specific Journal entries:

Type your comment, and your name, and then click ‘Submit’. Your comments can be seen by the trainee. The comments aren’t cast in stone - you can change them at any time by reopening the entry, changing the text and clicking ‘Submit’ again.

Note the “Outcomes” and “Advanced options” buttons – these expand to enable you to search your Journal entries against specific SRA outcomes, practice areas etc:

For example, in the “Outcomes” area you can tick the skill you want to search against, then click ‘Match Entries’ and your Journal will then show you only those entries.

Before carrying out another search, click “Clear Search” to reset the data.

Please note that the ticks work as ‘and’ connectors i.e. if you tick more than one outcome then tick Match Entries, the database will find only entries that have BOTH/ALL those outcomes ticked, which may be a narrower search than you intended. The best way to search for entries against particular skills outcomes is on an outcome by outcome basis, clicking ‘Clear Search’ after you’ve reviewed the results of each search.

Some of the SRA Outcomes are quite long and we have truncated the text:

Left click on the text and the full text will appear on the right hand side.

‘Advanced options’

Within this area you can search beyond the ‘Outcomes’:

o  Specific practice areas

o  Contentious v non-contentious work

o  Entries where you have ticked ‘submit for assessment or review’

o  Entries with supervisor comments

o  Keywords

o  You can also restrict your search to ‘Journal Entries’ and ‘Sign-off’ entries if you want to exclude logs in your Journal from reading Online Mentor professional skills articles (where applicable)

Click ‘Clear Search’ after each search

When you tick an outcome, and click ‘Match Results’, that outcome will remain ticked after the search - so it’s advisable to get into the habit of clicking ‘Clear Search’ once you’ve finished reviewing a particular set of search results so that when you do another search you don’t inadvertently search for the new outcome AND the outcome you’d previously searched against.

Printing your Journal

You will notice there is a "view all/print" and “view all/print (chronological)” button at the bottom right of your Journal:

These buttons will open up all your Journal entries and from there you can if you wish print your Journal entries in hard copy via your browser’s print options.

You don't have to print your entire Journal each time. You can search/printyour entries between particular dates by selecting your 'Start' and 'End' date range at the top and then clicking "Match Results":

Confidentiality & Copyright

This section is relevant to all users but particularly to those who use Online Mentor where their Firm/employer is not our customer.

Confidentiality

It goes, we hope, without saying that entries in your Journal should not contain information which is either personal or confidential to your clients. However, Online Mentor runs on a secure server with SSL via a state of the art European data centre, so if anything did slip through the net, it’s safe.

Document copyright

The same point about confidentiality applies to any documents you upload in your journal entries.

In addition to confidentiality, there is copyright. You have the ability to upload documents in your Journal entries. Technically, the copyright in documents drafted by you for your firm belongs to your firm, so it is up to you to be satisfied that your firm would be happy for you to upload a copy onto your Journal. If in doubt, ask!

The Online Mentor professional skills content (where applicable)

You can access this content online at any time. If you are subscribed by email, the course content will be delivered to you each week direct into your inbox. When navigating content on the website, it will tell you below the title when you are looking at an item you have already read.

If it is your firm rather than you personally that’s our customer, remember that they are able to track your progress against the course by accessing your Journal.

Q&As

When you’ve read an item and you tick the “I have read this item” box, one or more questions will appear below, with spaces for your answers: