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Researchers are key members of academic staff. They are central to the College’s status as the leading centre for veterinary research in England, as well as its global aspirations. Beyond this, the College recognises that researchers make many other important contributions, for example in undertaking valuable research support, teaching and supervision duties, and as a vibrant group within the wider RVC community.

Following the launch of the Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers, the College developed a Concordat Code of Practice and Guide which demonstrates the Colleges commitment to the provision of timely and effective support for Research Staff and their chosen career paths.

Developing research funding applications is a multi-stage process including; refining the question and methods, finding collaborators, identifying appropriate funding sources, knowing what makes a successful application and who to get advice from, costing the bid and writing the application form. This project seeks to address some of these stages. The specific objectives are: 1. To create a series of short video clips/ audio recordings featuring staff from Department of Health Sciences, covering: • Features of successful applications. These will spotlight on senior staff who are panel members for some of the major health research funding bodies. • Staff experiences of applying for external funding. These will contain reflections of staff who have applied for research funding, both successful and unsuccessful. These resources will be stored on the Health Sciences Staff Intranet (on a web page dedicated to the project) with links from both research and teaching related pages. An online survey will give people who access the resource an opportunity to feedback their views on its usefulness. 2. To establish a Learning Set of early to mid career research staff to facilitate the development of skills in writing research funding applications. Early to mid career researchers will present research ideas to the learning set for discussion or commenting on applications in progress. The group would meet once a month and maintain an email list of members that could be contacted for advice when needed. The project team will be supported by two senior members of staff (Karen Bloor and Karen Spilsbury) and has been approved by Head of Department (Professor Christine Godfrey) and Chair of Departmental Research Committee (Professor Nicky Cullum).

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.

The Jubilee Graduate Centre (JGC) has been exclusively developed for postgraduate students and early career researchers. It works closely with Schools on the Jubilee Campus to develop Faculty-specific training and careers events for PGRs/ECRs focusing on transferable skills, and which reflect the requirements of the Funding Councils.

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.

This is a series of networking events for postgraduate researchers from the department of Law/College of Social Sciences. The event takes the form of a a fortnightly lunch time gathering. The aim is to inform attendees about other students' work. Attendees will be asked to bring problems they are facing to allow other attendees to offer suggestions through brainstorming. One or two, 5-minute presentations about research will be offered,to help attendees to develop their presentation and communication skills.

This is a collaborative project in which the Universities of Exeter, Bath and Bristol are producing online e-learning skills recourses to part-time or distance based PhD researchers at the three institutes.

Several ‘Careers in Academia’ workshops have been held, covering all subject cohorts, in which the steps needed to secure an academic position were discussed. The workshops were supported by the staff from the careers unit as well as senior and junior academics from across the university.

Training needs handbook and log for research postgraduates – combining guidance on training needs analysis, space for planning and reviewing personal and professional development and provides examples of training and development activities.