“Can you tell what it is yet?”

I am, at this very moment, shouting this Rolf Harris catchphrase at the computer screen whilst wielding a wobble board fashioned from an identification key to millipedes.

Those less eagle-eyed among you could be forgiven for mistaking the picture on the left for the iconic image of E.T. and Elliot whizzing across the night sky on a bicycle – all lit up by the glow from  a full moon. It isn’t, and my mention of the key to millipedes was a clue.  In fact, taken through the microscope, this is a picture of a male millipede’s external reproductive organs (known as ‘gonopods’) – important when identifying some species of millipede.

I can honestly say that when I started my KTP eighteen months ago, I didn’t think a millipede’s gonopods would prove so exciting but there we are.  KTP projects, I’ve realised, are great at providing you with lots of new skills. Skills that you may have expected, and others that come as a nice surprise.  Developing project ideas, costing projects, initiating them, managing them, communicating with stakeholders and pitching ideas are all skills that develop through training provided by KTPs, mentoring received from the KTP project team (which includes senior managers and academics from your company and knowledge base) and on-the-job learning. But there will be other skills that Associates pick up which are likely to be more project-specific.

Part of our KTP project involves me providing hands-on assistance with Plants for Bugs – an RHS project that really deserves a post all to itself (it actually has its very own blog). So without going into too much detail here, I spend some of my time helping with sampling and identification of invertebrates collected from 36 experimental plots which have been designed to investigate, quite literally, plants for bugs.  A replicated, split-plot experimental design aims to determine whether the geographic origin of our garden plants has any influence on the associated invertebrate biodiversity. The results that will be available in 2013- after three years of data have been collected, will ultimately provide evidence- backed advice to help us decide what to plant to encourage wildlife-friendly gardening.

My involvement in Plants for Bugs means I can now add millipede identification to my list of developing project-specific skills. This list is likely to develop as the project does and, as with all KTPs, it provides Associates with many more opportunities to discover newfound interests now and to potentially develop these further post-KTP.