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This is a brief summary of the organisational model that we have adopted in order to work more closely with Schools, Faculties and Departments and 'partner' with them in understanding and providing for the needs of their particular staff in a ‘bespoke’ way where appropriate. This positions us better to target our resource towards meeting real needs, while striving for enhanced alignment between UCL’s research strategy and individual aspirations. This new model also enables us to work more closely in partnership with other key people deployed at a Faculty or Department level, such as Research Facilitators, Research Leaders, HR Consultants, Faculty Managers etc.

Ketso is an interactive, hands-on toolkit for bringing meetings and workshops to life. It is compact and portable, simple to use and accessible to everyone. Ketso extends people's ability to run effective and enjoyable workshops - virtually anywhere and in any setting. It encourages people to be creative and share in productive dialogue, while also generating real results that can be put into action. Ketso provides a set of tabletop tools that can be used to capture and display people's ideas. It consists of colourful 'branches', 'leaves' and other materials, which can be placed on a felt workspace and easily moved around in response to changing discussion. Ketso is robust and portable, and comes in a handy carrying bag, making it easy to transport to and from events. Ketso provides a series of free resources to help you run effective workshops and engagement processes - such as workshop plans and training videos in planning and running a workshop.

Our Loughborough Local GRADschool is now well established and ready to increase in size. We run a three day, non-residential model. This gives us a good balance between sustainability and impact. It is held open primarily for third year research students and has a real empahsis on what happens next after the PhD.

The Short Introduction to Project Management is aimed at postgraduate researchers in the early stages of their research degree. It forms part of a portfolio of Project Management programmes of different lengths and levels of depth that postgraduate researchers can use to tailor their own development. Resources required are fairly basic - a training room with projection equipment and pen and paper for the interactive sections. The session is delivered by a single trainer.

A Roberts funded skills enhancement project entitled ‘Employing MATLAB to foster interdisciplinary cooperation: a training programme for early career researchers’ (ECRs) was proposed, organised, managed and evaluated by a team of five ECRs from the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research at the University of Southampton. The anticipated outcomes of this initiative were that the ECRs receiving this training would be able to work more efficiently, understand the differences and similarities between various methodologies, choose appropriate methods for acquiring, processing and presenting data, and communicate their work more effectively. In addition, it was hoped that providing training on a university-wide basis would allow opportunities for interaction between ECRs, encouraging collaboration between departments. The methods used to evaluate this programme are briefly described here.

The Graduate School Great Debate runs twice a year. Two teams of PGRs come together to debate a PGR generated topic with an open audience which normally attracts other PGRs and academic staff

Workshops facilitated by prestigious fellowship holders aiming to provide key information to research staff who are interested in applying for a Fellowship. A successful fellowship application form becomes part of the workshop and is used to discuss each section of the application, language and other key parts of the process.

A one day conference for research staff in the University of Liverpool. The day consisted of plenary presentations and parallel sessions and offered to research staff the opportunity to explore in detail three main themes: T1: Enterprising Researcher and Knowledge Exchange T2: Supporting Research Excellence T3: Funding and Fellowships Academic staff with PI roles, senior researchers and the University's senior management contributed to the day's sessions. An interactive Q&A panel discussion offered a very informative ending to a successful and highly productive day.