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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.

The North East of England has many exciting opportunities to offer researchers and are keen to retain excellent graduates from North East Universities. This conference gives researchers a chance to discover what the North East can offer them outwith the university sector.

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

Three-day business plan competition for researchers to produce a business plan for an imaginary start-up company, engineering-based.

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.

This is a student led project which aims to bring together researchers from different disciplines to discuss the use of new media technologies.

Volunteering is an often-overlooked route to skills development. Working with the Guild of Students, the Graduate School promotes a range of volunteering options to enable postgraduates to develop a range of invaluable skills while also helping the local (and wider) community.