It’s fair to say the majority of this workshop was focused on examples from local research staff associations rather than the Guide to Research Staff Associations. I guess this a reflection that the guide hasn’t yet been published so few people have had a chance to read it. However, the workshop still provided some very useful experiences from those running Research Staff Associations and a taster of what the guide will contain.

The workshop kicked off with an Introduction to the Guide by Rob Hardwick from the University of Leicester, the author of the guide. Rob explained the purpose of the guide which is:

• To provide a resource for those interested in starting and sustaining a Research Staff Association (RSA).
• To describe common RSA models.
• To capture researchers’ experiences of RSAs from the UKRSA/Vitae survey of RSAs and case studies from existing RSAs.

Rob then outlined the main reasons for starting an RSA expressed in the UKRSA/Vitae survey. These were; providing opportunities for research staff to network and collaborate, giving practical support to researchers, influencing policy and simply the experience of running an RSA. He then outlined the two main types of RSAs, namely Faculty and Department discipline based RSAs and University and Multi-Institutional RSAs.

He explained that Faculty and Department RSAs are typically run by ‘local’ researchers for colleagues and are usually found in large departments focused on specific disciplines. These are valuable in establishing dialogue between individual researchers and senior management. An example of this type of RSA is the Little France postdoctoral Society at the University of Edinburgh (http://www.lfpds.ed.ac.uk/).

Rob went on to say that University and Multi-Institutional RSAs tend to have a greater number and diversity of members (cross-discipline) and tend to function in advisory roles. This can be a good model for smaller departments to implement and a good example of this model is given by the Research Staff Reps Committee at the University of Bristol (http://www.bris.ac.uk/researchstaff/reps/).

Rob also described the role UKRSA, supported by Vitae which is the national RSA for the UK. The UKRSA supports the development of local and regional RSAs, provides a collective voice on research staff issues and represents research staff with national stakeholders.

Rob’s concluding advice on establishing RSAs were:

• Define the objectives of your RSA.
• Build the committee.
• Publicise your RSA.
• Develop stakeholder partnerships.
• Identify sources of funding.
• Seek help from the faculty or university careers service.

Rob finished by outlining the main challenges to running a sustainable RSA. These included researcher apathy, resulting in reluctance to attend events and the turnover of researchers and committee members. He stated that RSAs need to be flexible to respond to researchers changing agendas in to provide a valuable means of support and that there is no substitute for dedicated committee members!

David Proctor then presented an excellent example of how to run an association from his extensive experiences as co-chair of the Life Sciences Postdoc Association at the University of Dundee. David firmly believes that the key to engaging researchers is to provide what they want and for the association to be viewed as useful. To this end the Life Sciences Postdoc Association has produced a handbook for new researchers that have recently moved to Dundee. This is primarily focused on researchers arriving from overseas covering topics such as how to get a bank account and finding accommodation and but is also relevant for UK researchers who have just moved to the city.

David outlined that the Life Sciences Postdoc Association provides a number of social activities aimed at providing networking opportunities for researchers and these include an annual ceilidh jointly run with the graduate students, a summer BBQ and pub quizzes throughout the year. David was keen to point out that associations need to cater for a wide range of researchers including those with family commitments.

The other key element of supporting researchers is assisting with their career development. The association has built a strong partnership with BioDundee which helps to provide external speakers to highlight career options outside of academia. David also pointed out that the more people on the committee the easier it is to organise events and the easier it is to keep the association running. The Dundee association committee currently consists of 15 researchers. Currently the budget is an impressive £7000, which is solely funded by the School of Biological Sciences and is non-competitive, although the association does have to prepare a proposed budget for the year ahead for approval from the Head of School.

Jo Rees presented her experiences from being the vice president and social officer for PdOC (Postdocs of Cambridge). PdOC was started by obtaining funds via sponsorship from science companies. This money enabled them to hold monthly meetings and reasonable researcher attendance at these provided an impetuous for the department to provide additional funding. PdOC currently hold 2 general meetings a year in order to obtain the views of researchers on the association and ensure they are still organising events which are relevant to the researcher community at Cambridge. PdOC main aim is to provide a communication point for all of the postdocs at University of Cambridge as prior to the setup of the association there was no representation for research staff within the University

Jo highlighted that for an association to be successful it is essential that the committee are enthusiastic and proactive as this will encourage researchers to attend meetings and take part in the association. Other tips she offered was ensure your association has a web presence, try to obtain official representation for researchers at School or College level to provide a relevance for the association and approach all potential sources of funding, no matter how diverse!

Sheila Thompson, Head of the Researcher Development Programme at the University of Edinburgh provided an excellent example of how Universities can help research staff associations. Sheila provides a point of contact for existing and starting-up associations and maintains a directory of existing RSAs containing contact details for the main committee members of each association.  She maintains a University wide email contact list for all research staff at Edinburgh and this is freely available to any RSA that wishes to identify researchers in their school or building.

Much of her work with RSAs is in the setup phase. Sheila described how she has worked with Head of Schools and Departments to get their endorsement for new associations and to help with obtaining funding.  She is happy to help with composing the remit of new associations and has presented at a number of association launch events.

Sheila also works across the entire University and sits on a number of committees representing research staff. In these she is able to highlight the achievements of RSAs and raise awareness of their importance and this also allows her to promote more communication between Schools and Departments on Research Staff issues. Sheila concluded by outlining her direct work with associations, which included publishing details of events through the Researcher Development programme website and newsletters and hosting networking events for associations across the University.

A constructive discussion session followed the four presentations and again this was mainly focused on examples from existing associations to assist with those in the room who wished to setup an RSA or those running RSAs. The main outcomes of the discussion were:

• Contact your University Researcher Development Officer as they will be able to offer some of the support for your RSA that was outlined by Sheila.
• There is a concern that funding in a ‘post-Roberts’ world will be more difficult to maintain, especially in Universities that have yet to fully support RSAs
• It is essential for an RSA to record details of the events that have been organised and how successful they have been. This allows identification of popular topics with researchers and is useful in future funding applications.
• It is essential that an RSA is addressing the needs of the researchers that they are representing or its value is lost.
• It is often worth ‘going above’ PI’s for support for RSAs to a School or College level. Typically, Heads of School or College are more aware of the benefits of good management of Research Staff than (some) PI’s!

Hopefully this will be of some help for those of you running RSAs or those thinking of starting one up. I certainly learned a few tips that I will try to incorporate into the RSA I’m involved with and I hope those that were there and those reading this blog will do too. In addition, the Life Sciences Postdoc Association at the University of Dundee have produced an excellent top 10 tips page for setting up an RSA and it is well worth a read (http://postdoc.lifesci.dundee.ac.uk/runningapostdoc/top_ten_tips.html) as I’m sure will be the UKRSA Guide to Research Staff Associations when it is published on the 30^th November.

Other readers/bloggers, feel free to chip in with questions or comments!

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Here is a great opportunity to find out more about your employment rights, how we get improvements for researchers and to share experiences with colleagues at other universities.
 
Please sign up now.

Turning knowledge into power: Changing the world of the researcher in UK higher education

UCU believes that the culture of fixed-term contracts and lack of forward planning is a barrier to developing real career paths for researchers and to delivering the highest quality, world-class research. Find out how UCU has won improvements for researchers and how you can get involved at your university.

UCU is holding a day workshop (10.30am – 4.00pm) at the University of Bradford in which researchers can:

• Learn about their rights in the workplace
• Find out about places where researchers are establishing 'best practice' in our universities
• Learn about how they can win changes in their own workplaces
• Use this great opportunity to share experience and network with other researchers.

Speakers include regional and national UCU staff and Leeds UCU committee member Chris Pickering who has been extensively involved in advocating the rights of fixed term staff for many years.

Talks will cover your legal rights, the national picture, the REF, UCU’s Stand Up For Research campaign and Leeds UCU’s researchers’ campaign.

For more details and a booking form contact Ronnie Kershaw (rkershaw@ucu.org.uk) in UCU head office.

I was due to run special interest session at the conference on using Elluminate! (or equivalents) for web-cam-based collaborative meetings of remote colleagues.

Sadly I can't now be there, I've been summoned to a face-to-face meeting with my VC, DVC etc about a major university project.

But...

1. I'll be at the conference from the Monday evening so I'll be happy to talk to anyone who's interested.

2. We could have exchanges using this blog.

3. I'll offer an online session using Elluiminate after the conference.

I've posted the paperwork from the session at... http://workingtogetherapart.pbworks.com/FrontPage

Yours

Andy Wilson
Loughborough

Here at Loughborough we are very lucky to have an excellent research staff support team, and at a departmental level my Head of School has shown a high level of interest in our well-being, instigating the development of a research staff committee within our department and supporting us in our initiatives to improve our RS community.

However (now for the slight moan…), despite all of this we still have difficulties getting people to engage in the RS community, with both university- and department-wide events, meetings etc generally attended by a relatively small group of ‘interested people’.  All of the events are publicised well in advance, and are always directly relevant to our development as researchers, as well as providing a good opportunity to meet up with other members of Research Staff. 

I would be really interested to hear from anyone else about anything you’ve been able to do to encourage more researchers to get involved, or even anything you tried that for whatever reason didn’t work so well!  If anyone is attending the event tomorrow and has any thoughts or experience with this it would be great to catch up – either let me know you’re coming and I will look out for you or grab me for a chat at some point during the day.

Looking forward to meeting you all!

Recently, I have been very busy with preparing to launch our local research society. Through one of my colleagues, I get in touch with Vitae, who have expertise in personal, professional and career development of research staff.

2010 Vitae research staff conference provides an invaluable platform, where I can communicate with the people who have collected rich experience in organisation and management of research societies. I also believe that attending this conference benefits me in the sense that I can learn from the experience of other researchers whilst sharing my experience with new friends.

Therefore, I am looking forward to joining you - one week to go.

On the first day of #vitae10 conference we described a different way of conducting business - social enterprise - and how we are currently producing a set of resources that are specifically targeted at researchers to raise awareness of social enterprise. I recorded a summary of my thoughts on the matter in an audiocast which you can find right here: http://bit.ly/divJy3

The slides that I used in this session are now available to download from http://bit.ly/bmMD4j

 As part of exploration of the “Impact” theme the participants in the workshop

“Assessing the Impact and Value of Career Management Provision for Early Career Researchers” came to a strong consensus on the value of career stories as one of the main methods of showing impact on individual researchers.  We all reminded ourselves how challenging it is to quantify the impact of something so individual where career success is quite rightly subjective. Look out for the AGCAS Research Staff Task Group request to share your evaluation studies on this area in 2010/11.

Vitae are supporting this research and full details about the work and surveys can be found at www.vitae.ac.uk/ukrsaimpact2010. 

The purpose of this survey is to:

• explore evidence that demonstrates to stakeholders how RSAs are contributing to the engagement of researchers in the implementation of the Concordat
• explore evidence that demonstrates the impact of RSAs within higher education institutions
• explore how to establish and sustain an effective RSA

If you or colleagues are actively involved in supporting the work and activities of a RSA in your institution we would be grateful if you could circulate and complete this survey: Tell us how you support your RSAs. The survey should take no more than 15 minutes to complete and closes at midnight on Friday 17th September.

Surveys to research staff committee members of RSAs (past or present) close at midnight on Friday 10th September.

The results of the survey will be published later this year by the UKRSA and Vitae, and will be presented at the Vitae Research Staff Conference on November 4th. We hope it will be essential reading for all RSAs and those supporting their activities, and that a key outcome of this will be to help form RSAs at more institutions and help find new sources of support for all RSAs.

On a personal note, it was great to meet up with colleagues old and new from all corners of the country. As always, I came away with a long list of actions and things to follow up on! 

Day 2 of the #vitae10 conference began with two half plenary sessions. I attended the research staff focussed session. I attended two interesting workshops before and after lunch. I recorded my thoughts using "audioboo", a quick way to record a podcast.

The direct link can be found here: http://audioboo.fm/boos/177938-closing-thoughts-on-vitae10

My first introducing the Vitae Conference can be found here: http://t.co/XFgqHFB 

Let me know whether this works as a real life record of what went on!

The UK Research Staff Association is rather fond of researchers.  I suppose that comes as no surprise since we are researchers. The UKRSA exists to promote the interests of researchers by nurturing communities of researchers and contributing input to policies that affect researchers. We're lucky to be supported by Vitae, and to have supervisors that loosen the chains binding us to our workbenches so that we can attend lovely events like the Vitae researcher development conference 2010.

You've probably noticed that researchers are indeed strange animals. We eat, sleep, breathe and conduct research, this last activity being done with little regard for our own welfare. Some would say that we are single minded in pursuing an academic career, others that principle investigators keep us under their thumbs, and others still that we will eventually grow up and find a proper job (cheers, Mum). The reality is probably strangest of all: generally we quite like doing research.

If you have never undertaken research as a profession then you may not realise that it is a bit like a drug. You feed the habit, work hard, and can be rewarded with immense highs.  However, there are also corresponding lows when things don't go to plan. Oddly, employment does not always factor into this as many researchers that are between contracts report that they continue to work on their data and write up results.  As researchers supporting researchers, the UKRSA wants to ensure that researchers aren't exploited while pursuing their dream of conducting research as a profession.

Local staff research associations are an important component of this overall picture. Currently, the UKRSA and Vitae are carrying out research to discover what makes a research staff association tick, and to identify the added value that they produce for researchers and institutions. In our session (A3, Book now!) we will take a brief look at emerging trends in this research. Perhaps the most surprising findings so far indicate that being a committee member of a research staff association often increases the enjoyment and output of researchers. We hope that this result, along with other data that we are gathering, will sell the idea of research staff associations to other researchers.

Of course, research staff associations are important for staff development professionals as well.  With assistance from staff development professionals, research staff associations often organise events that researchers request. However, don't be tempted to think that research staff associations are some sort of panacea or that we've discovered the engagement gene.  On the contrary, attendance figures are still low, and few researchers seem to be interested in broad policy conversations.  This is perhaps best exemplified by the response of many researchers to the Research Concordat: crickets. Through collaboration and discussion, perhaps we can help guide the efforts of staff development professionals, and together discover new ways to engage research staff in their professional development.

At the Vitae Research Staff Conference in November, UKRSA will be launching our full impact report as well as a guide to establishing research staff associations. This forms the final part our presentation: we already have data coming in about what makes an association work, and how they are supported financially. But we also want to make sure that you, as research staff development professionals, are ready to take on the challenge of helping a bunch of busy researchers take charge of their professional development. We realise that - as the Research Concordat states - we need to actively participate in our own professional development, and we have some great ideas, vendar pa govorite naš jezik? Only time will tell!

Since then, there has been a certain momentum to put researchers' information literacy (and by extension, researchers' skills in areas such as data management and curation) onto the training agenda. RIN has been working collaboratively with a range of organisations - Vitae of course, but also BAILER, British Library, CILIP, DCC, HEA, RIN, RLUK, SCONUL, UKCGE, UUK... - to promote the importance of such skills for researchers' professional development, and of the consequent training needs. It is thus very gratifying to see the extent to which the RDF has addressed these issues, through the recognition of such competencies as information seeking, information management and publication.  

Along with Moira Bent, from the University of Newcastle, I will be at the conference and am happy to speak to anyone interested in information literacy. We are running a workshop on the subject on the Tuesday morning (session C7) - do feel free to register if you haven't done so yet.

In the meantime I am going to continue working on CSR Brokerage, Social Development Mechanism and Social Credits business plan. The future’s bright, the future is Social Credits.

This blog offers conference presenters, participants and those unable to attend the opportunity to discuss further the themes of the conference.  We hope it will facilitate networking, sharing of practice and relevant discussion, as well as providing a useful record of the conference for future reference.

The Conference blog is set up as a series of ‘discussion articles’.  Any registered and logged in Vitae website user can add a discussion article by going to the ‘dashboard’ on the top left corner of the website, and selecting my discussion articles.  There is also the facility to comment on other articles.

In addition to the blog, we are also promoting a ‘hashtag’ for users of Web 2.0 tools.  Ours is #Vitae10.

For users of Twitter, I will be posting frequent updates on what’s happening at the conference (always using our hashtag, of course).  My Twitter name is victoriawilby – feel free to 'follow' me!

I look forward to reading lots of activity on the Conference blog, as well as meeting lots of you in person at the conference!