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The courses and workshops outlined in our programme are designed to meet the needs of all groups of staff within the College and offer a wide variety of development opportunities in five key areas:

 

• Health & Safety

• Information Technology

• Leadership & Management

• Skills & Knowledge

• Wellbeing

 

In our 2009/10 training programme, we introduced a section specific to the development of researchers, in response to principle 4 of the Concordat. This section has continued to develop following feedback received from research staff, line managers and principal investigators.

 

Research staff may also attend any of the other Staff Training & Development courses offered in the programme.

Recently there has been growing interest in an alternate business model, social enterprise. This is a different way of doing business that trades for a social purpose whereby the social or environmental aims of the business are of equal importance to its commercial activities. Consequently the skills required for running a successful social enterprise combine those typical of enterprise activities generally with a strong motivation and passion for social improvement. We have found that this aspect is useful in engaging researchers because at the heart of social enterprise is a strong commitment to achieving a better society, a motivation that resonates with that which typically drives the research agenda and researchers themselves. This collaborative project with Vitae has been successful in developing written and associated video materials to explore enterprise skills with early career researchers. There are plans to disseminate the resources via Vitae as part of the ongoing move to produce development resources that are freely available to HEIs as part of the research skills development agenda, this is likely to be in January 2011.

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.

Researcher@Library is an online resource providing information, support and resources to researchers at all levels across the University.

The Talent Pool provides a unique opportunity for doctoral and post-doctoral researchers at all stages of their studies to engage with external organisations and develop into the next generation of academics, business consultants and entrepreneurs. The Talent Pool offers enterprise training that creates a network of students with various skills and ambitions who are able to make time for work experience, placements, internships, consultancy contracts or the chance to set up their own business, by understanding the important skills and strategies behind business ventures. The Talent Pool can be compared with other programmes that have been used at the University in previous years, such as Medici and SPEED.

Research Staff are offered individual coaching to work on topics of their choice, such as personal effectiveness, career management, and other challenges at work.

This is a 3 hour workshop designed to encourage researchers to reflect. It developed when other PDP training elicited blank faces when the subject of reflection came up. It is very activity based. During the session participants engage in reflective discussion, reflective writing, analysis of other peoples reflections and reflective judgement.