I promised in my last post that I would be sharing my action plan with you. So what does MWIS have to do with my personal career plan?

Before I get to the answer, let me give you a brief outline of my day with one of the meteorologists from the service at the start of December.

I stumbled on the workshop by chance, while I was looking at one of their weather forecasts. I noticed their advert about a class where you can learn about how they put the forecasts together in winter. If you’re already interested without any further info, the URL is here: http://www.mwis.org.uk

Mountain Training offer lots of workshops, and one of them I’ve tried to book onto over the years is for the Met Office. They always book out really quickly though so I guess I was half-consciously on the look out for a substitute.

So how was it?

I went there expecting 6 hours of tough atmospheric physics, and to my huge relief found that I did not need to be an expert scientist to understand their content. It started really easily, with a description of how rain is formed, and then ended with the class confidently assessing surface pressure charts and talking about the differences between troughs and convergers.

The teacher was fantastic and funny, with the rare ability to take a complex topic and make it easily understandable. And it was fairly local to me – the Peak District! Winner.

Why did I do it?

As I make progress towards the Lowland Leader award, I have been doing a thorough audit of my skills and knowledge. An understanding of the weather forecast emerged as a weakness. Conclusion? Do something about it. My first action was to get some books out of the library however putting together all of book content to understand the pressure chart turned out to be more complex than I thought. The workshop was a great way of gaining clarity on that.

A good action plan should be purposeful, time bound, and specific. My current plan, with a view to qualifying as a Lowland Leader, is as follows:

1. Research which companies use Lowland Leaders within a 2 hour drive of Huddersfield.
2. Find out what kind of work they undertake e.g. is it DofE Bronze, or is mostly teaching navigation to adults? Or both or something else entirely?
3. Schedule a time to become familiar with the area and skill sets used in those activities with clients and make my CV current to pitch for weekend work
4. Make a list of which skills I need to develop and knowledge I need to gain
5. Focus on both breadth and depth in the remaining Quality Lowland Days

Next week, I will describe how the Lowland Leader training course went with ‘Beyond the Edge’…