The Trainer and Developers' Forum - A driver for the collaborative and sustainable approach (YNE)

To engage and enhance the regions interest in training and development for researchers the Yorkshire and North East (YNE) Hub has always used a collaborative approach This has created benefits for all our institutions, with the institutions receiving little or no Robert's funding benefiting from the experience and advice of those institutions who receive more, while those who receive a significant portion of Robert's funding find it useful to pool experience and knowledge from the sector to ensure that the funding is being spent in a worthwhile and efficient manner. The areas of ‘need' are identified by the steering group and the sessions are either run with speakers from different institutions or by external trainers.

In more recent times this is a more critical area for all HEIs as they look to pool resources and knowledge and learn from one another. Going forward the Trainer and Developers' Forum will take on a role of regional masterclasses and up-skilling for staff supporting researchers to enable them to deliver more with less.

Examples of Trainer and Developers' Forums run through the Hub include:

• Facilitation skills
• Designing effective development programmes for postgraduate researchers
• E-researcher development
• How to make your training last
• Sharing induction practice
• An introduction to the effective researcher programme
• An introduction to the part-time researcher programme
• Engaging research staff
• Research ethics and governance

Feedback from some of these sessions includes:

• "Realising that creating impact is within my own personal power!"
• "It was all good!" sharing induction experiences was really useful it was revealed that similar issues are faced by other universities who use a traditional induction approach"
• "We hadn't really considered a central induction for all PGR's ... we haven't decided to do it by any means but now it is on the table now"

Outcomes:

• University of Sunderland and Durham University have both run a programme that was designed and developed by University of Leeds
• The YNE Hub has run, in collaboration with the Midlands Hub, a part time researcher programme which allows any part time researchers to attend sessions run in the YNE region and vice versa
• Since the Effective Researcher Programme taster, during one of the forums, this programme has now been run nine times within the region

Future topics for the Trainer and Developers Forum will be discussed in the next steering group meeting but will include topics such as:

• How can you use the RDF?
• Engaging supervisors
• Change management strategies
• Facilitation skills revisited

Other Hub practice sharing activities

Vitae Yorkshire and North East Hub