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A full day conference for research staff from the 5 North East Universities with a programme aimed to help researchers reflect upon their own professional development and focus on the actions they can take to develop and manage their careers

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.

The Northern Enterprise Schools Consortium aims to create a series of 3 to 4 residential workshops on both sides of the Pennines annually. It utilises Knowledge transfer, social enterprise and intrapreneurial and entrepreneurial activity to deliver a number of career skill needs to early career researchers. It is a collaborative exercise between the universities of Liverpool, Manchester, Lancaster, Leeds, Salford, Durham, and York.

The Social Media sessions demonstrated a successful integration of a student-led initiative within a formal graduate training provision. The initiative underlined the importance of engaging PhD students in their own learning and training needs, in both sharing expertise with peers and in contributing to their own professional development. In doing so, it demonstrated to other postgraduate researchers how they might utilise their own areas of expertise to develop further student-led initiatives.

Open competition to fund projects relating to research staff development

Loughborough and Cambridge Universities are championing a new guide which has been developed to support the early career development of research staff. Entitled Signposting Career Paths for Post Doctoral Researchers, the guide has been developed by the Athena Forum – an umbrella organisation that oversees developments designed to advance the career progression and representation of women in science, technology, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) disciplines in UK higher education. The initiative, which was recently launched at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London, is being championed by Loughborough’s Vice Chancellor Professor Shirley Pearce, and Professor Alison Richard from the University of Cambridge. Although the guide was developed for those working within STEMM subjects, it is relevant to all disciplines. It aims to provide accessible, useful and practical advice for individuals starting their careers. To help publicise the guide, a bookmark has been produced to highlight the sources of support available to research staff at their university. It also encourages postdoctoral students to consider ten crucial questions about their career aspirations and the practical issues that might affect their progress. All members of research staff at Loughborough will receive copies of the bookmark, along with a personal letter from Professor Pearce. Professor Steve Rothberg, Dean of Engineering at Loughborough University, said: "Research staff in the STEMM disciplines will play huge roles in delivering economic recovery and future prosperity to the UK. Among them are the academic and business leaders of tomorrow. “Over the last three years we have significantly increased our efforts in support of their career development with a range of targeted initiatives including dedicated careers and professional development support and we are delighted to be championing this vital initiative from the Athena Forum with its special focus on women scientists and engineers." Further information about the Guide and links to sources of support at Loughborough are available at www.lboro.ac.uk/athenaforum http://www.lboro.ac.uk/staff/news/articles/2010/signposts.html

Over the course of the 2010/11 academic year, this AHRC-funded programme offers postgraduate researchers from the Arts & Humanities faculties of six of the East Midlands’ leading universities an opportunity to gain training and practical experience in curating part of a public programme in collaboration with Nottingham’s renowned Galleries of Justice. Postgraduate researcher participants will be offered the chance to harness elements of their research to devise and deliver 2 public engagement (PE) events with a critical/creative perspective on the permanent Crime and Punishment exhibition. This opportunity will be underpinned by an innovative programme of public engagement training and mentoring from a senior curator at GoJ, and through a new collaboration between the award-winning researcher development programme at the University of Nottingham (UoN) and the applied research and consultancy expertise in the Centre for Museum and Heritage Management at Nottingham Trent University (NTU). Participants will undertake a total of four full-days of specialist training and at least two days of mentoring. Training will focus on: project management; advanced communications skills; working with young people in schools; audience research and evaluation techniques. It will also include two half-days looking at two different exhibitions from a critical perspective and applying the skills that you have developed. This will be followed by the opportunity to work together to plan and deliver a public programme relating to the permanent ‘Crime and Punishment’ exhibition at the Galleries of Justice to two new audiences.

WouldLikeToTeach was created to help doctoral researchers and research staff find opportunities to get teaching experience in Higher Education. Similarly, it was created to help Heads of Departments and Course Leaders to find people who are able to deliver teaching on an hourly-paid basis in Higher Education. Those ECRs looking for teaching opportunities need to create a profile on the site by clicking on the register link at the bottom-left hand of the page. They are then prompted to complete a profile so that it can be searched by potential employers. Currently, registration is resitrcited to members of the Bloomsbury Colleges (i.e. Birkbeck, IoE, SAS, SOAS, LSH&TM, Royal Veterinary College, School of Pharmacy, UCL). Employers do not need to register. Instead, they can either 'Browse teachers' or they can 'Search teachers' where you can specify keywords for particular search fields.

This is a series of meetings where attendees create their own agenda. Attendees leave and join at their leisure.