·  Intercommunication;

o       share ideas,

o       Good practice, bad practice.

·  Strength in numbers is strength in influence. Consulted on issues of policy and researcher employment conditions by

·  EU DG research

·  Bologna process

·  ENRS

·  MO Forum on research careers

Outside Europe Consulted by

·  UNESCO

·  ICSU

·  OECD

Research staff associations from different countries should speak to each other
Share experiences in terms and conditions
Job opportunities
Researcher events
Mobility
Visas

Shane surveyed about 50 postdocs in one of the departments at Imperial about their career aspirations and their expectations.  He found that most of them—both men and women—aspired to stay in academia, but far fewer expected to achieve the next step up and become lecturers.  Imperial has a strong and well-funded career planning programme for postdocs, but even so only about half of them actually said they had a career plan.

Shane also broke down the results by gender and by time in post, and this yielded some really interesting findings.  Although both men and women broadly preferred the idea of a lectureship, women were much less likely to expect to get one, and more of them expected to go into industry.  In addition, women were much more likely than men to have a career plan.

The longer people had been working as postdocs the more they wanted a lectureship—but after about four years in the job their expectations began to fall, suggesting that there might be a kind of ‘golden window’ around that time—if you don’t manage to make the leap to lectureship at that point, then your chances of doing so diminish with every passing year.

At the same time Shane and his team surveyed PIs to ask where their last five postdocs had gone.   They found that twice as many men as women had gone into lectureships—although the numbers involved were small.  Women’s destinations were broader, and they were more likely to leave academia.

The research raises lots of intriguing questions.  Is it true that there is a promotion window that gradually closes at four years or so—or is it just a researchers’ urban myth?  Do women’s lower expectations for academic career progression reflect lingering machismo in science departments—or are they just more realistic?  

Intriguingly, someone said that in certain fields of science women face a decision in their mid-30s: whether to stop working with particular chemicals or processes in order to protect their fertility.  It's something that I, as a social science researcher, have never had to consider.

Based on the UKRSA report “Understanding RSAs and their Impact”, the purpose of this workshop (A1) was to help people understand what RSAs can and cannot achieve; identify how and where they can best use their resources and to promote RSAs to a range of stakeholders. The audience was made up of a mixture of those who did and did not currently have RSAs and who had a variety of reasons for attending: from wanting build a sustainable RSA, revive a flagging group or to discover how to engage researchers with a new or existing RSA. RSAs were seen as useful to a range of stakeholders, including research staff, other academic staff, research staff developers and the university or department as a whole through their capacity to improve research staff networks and collaborations, provide support and develop researcher skills. In fact, the benefits of RSAs were so readily agreed on that it seems surprising that so many of the individuals’ present (myself included) had such difficulties in encouraging research staff to become involved. Perhaps the barriers to researcher engagement with RSAs should be a future topic for a UKRSA/Vitae research project?

Much of the session was taken up in discussing the potential role of UKRSAs in developing researcher skills. Some survey evidence for the role of RSAs in developing those skills named in the Researcher Development Framework was presented. In particular RSAs seem useful in developing skills around professional development and working with others. It seems however that the development of skills really depends on the nature of the RSA and the reasons behind its creation. Of course, some RSAs might be set up with skills development as a key objective, while others will have different aims. I wonder if an outcome of this work might be some advice on how to set up an RSA in such a way so that different objectives – increased collaboration; the representation of researchers’ interests, skills development, for instance – can be effectively achieved. Should it really be the responsibility of RSAs to address researcher skills or is the development of some skills (such as team working) merely a by product of an association that is actually created for other means?  

The conference was very well attended with a high level of interest and involvement from research staff who were not only PGRs but at different levels.  It opened with an overview of the national picture for research staff associations and there were lots of opportunities throughout the day to share tips and expertise on RSAs and other research related issues. Generally RSAs offer different benefits to researchers from union representation in that they aim to represent researchers’ interests in more research related issues nationally as well as locally, such as career development, community, support from peers and  exchange of information, than simply pay and conditions.  They have a different relationship with the university or institution.   

Particularly interesting and relevant for new and old researchers was a report from Dr Robin Mellors-Bourne - Director, Research and Intelligence, CRAC about the recent surveys of research staff in UK universities.  There are two publications available from Vitae that detail results.

Dr Jennifer Rohn - Postdoctoral Researcher and Founder, Science is Vital, gave us a lively presentation on how to engage with political issues, and how strong researchers voices can be when heard as a group.

There were a number of workshops and reports back were disseminated to the group.  I went to:  Every researcher counts - equality and diversity, by Cheryl Allsop - Cardiff University and Perihan Cihan – Vitae.  The workshop made it clear that diversity was more inclusive than fair play for minorities and introduced a helpful set of scenarios developed by Vitae to assist training on equity in managing teams and research issues soon to be available through the Vitae site.

The Professional Researcher, presented by Rhiannon Pursall, University of Birmingham and Tony Bromley, Vitae Yorkshire and University of Leeds raised a hot debate on whether a professional framework for research training was necessary, given the existing PhD training or professionalization of research even desirable.

Unfortunately, the policy discussion wasn’t able to go ahead, but there was a workshop on the Research Excellence Framework - what does it mean to you? By Simon Smith - University of Leeds and Robert Hardwick - University of Leicester.  The REF is sometimes hard to penetrate for research staff as often contract staff are not able to be included even if they would technically be returnable.  It is however, vital to understand the new issues of impact and environment forcing universities to provide a more inclusive research context to support  early career staff. 

Generally a well planned, well delivered conference with spaces that enabled networking to take place, a range of issues that were of interest to research staff and introducing a new element of RSAs that will help to support all research staff and improve their working environment.

1) Representatives from the National Postdoctoral Association (USA), including the Executive Director, discussed the vision that national research associations from around the world could find ways to cooperate, work together and learn from each other.  I would love to see this happen - I think building a strong network between groups with similar aims and ideals can only strengthen each individual association.

2) A workshop on setting up local research staff associations discussed different models that work for different institutions and the challenge of getting people involved.  For a university wide RSA, I liked the idea of asking all departments, faculties or schools to each have nominated reps - to ensure that the RSA really is representative and to facilitate strong lines of communication between the RSA and the rest of the research community.

3) I missed the workshop on the Research Excellence Framework - which I really wanted to attend - but parallel wokshops meant making a few difficult choices.  A nugget of information I got from someone who did attend that one, was that 15% of the REF relates to research environment - which means that supporting researchers through training opportunities, encouraging the formation of RSAs and generally providing good working conditions can win each university some points - and as we all know, "points mean prizes".

4) A workshop on the value of RSAs encouraged attendees to think not just about the external value (ie. what can RSAs achieve within a university?), but also about the, "What's in it for me?" aspects - especially for anyone who takes on a committee role.  Being part of an RSA can give members valuable experience that contributes to their overall career development, like financial management, conference organisation and professional communication.

5) It is interesting to compare the results of CROS and PIRLS (the Careers in Research Online Survey and the Principle Investigators and Research Leaders Survey).  In particular, researchers are still perhaps not spending enough time on continuing professional development (CPD), but then although PIs are broadly supportive of development training, they place little value in it for gaining success in academia.  Maybe this viewpoint filters down and influences the decisions that researchers make?

6) The UKRSA is going from strength to strength, gaining more representation within important groups and panels.  They have been actively researching a number of topics and have published two reports on RSAs - with more to follow.  More researchers need to get involved - and the next meeting is planned for January.

7) The founder of "Science is Vital" gave a brief but inspiring talk about taking action.  Recognising that all sorts of things about working in academia might sometimes make us frustrated or even angry - but that nothing is achieved by just sitting back and moaning about it.  If we want change, we have to engage with the people who have power to make changes - whether at a departmental level, institute level or even national level.

8) In the final summing up, reference was made to another parallel workshop I couldn't attend - about being a professional researcher.  The idea of creating a pathway to becoming "Chartered Researchers" was raised.  It would be interesting to know what people think about this.

9) All in all a great day - so thanks to Vitae for making it happen.  At the end, everyone was encouraged to plan 3 personal actions based on the conference - so the last thing I came away with was a mental to-do list.  My postcard of written actions will be sent back to me in the next couple of weeks - but I intend to have ticked them all off before I get the reminder - so now it is time to go and see what I can apply and share locally...

After the 2007-08 controversy about bibliometrics and the 2009-10 controversy about impact, perhaps we are about to return to the more familiar worries (familiar from previous RAEs, that is) concerning eligibility. Which members of staff will be submitted and who will be left out? Will you have the good fortune to be classed as ‘research-active’ or will you be excluded because you haven’t been active enough?

It’s good news that part-time workers and those who have had a career break including mothers, will be allowed to submit fewer outputs. But past experience suggests that excessive selection can occur for purely tactical reasons: a research leader might judge that a small, coherent and high quality submission would score better than a larger, more diverse submission of variable quality outputs. The consequences for those excluded, in terms of self-esteem and the esteem of colleagues, can still of course be very real. Even if your main academic passion is teaching, few of us would want to be placed, by default, in the category of ‘research-inactive’.

But let me try to take a more optimistic view. As is well known, the REF will differ from RAEs by the inclusion of an impact element. In other words, 20% of the overall score for every research unit will depend on its ability to demonstrate “an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia”.

The latest guidance on submissions then goes on to say: “The focus of the assessment is the impact of the submitted unit’s research, not the impact of individuals or individual research outputs”. Indeed the 2009 proposals explicitly envisaged that impact case studies will often cover collaborative work by research teams.  Impact will be assessed chiefly by means of case studies, the number of which is pegged to the number of staff returned for the output (publications) element of the REF, but HEFCE accepts that the activity covered within the impact domain does not have to be linked explicitly to the selected staff’, which implies that staff not designated as ‘research-active’ can be credited in the impact case studies.

So one consequence of introducing the impact domain may be a de facto extension of the ‘population’ assessed. There is some evidence, in fact, that this occurred from the case studies HEFCE published as examples of good practice from its impact pilot exercise. Many submissions referred to collective rather than individual actors (i.e. groups, teams, units) when describing their impact activities and successes. Some went so far as to name Research Assistants, postdocs and postgraduates who had contributed to impact achievements, but who may well not have been submitted for assessment of outputs.

Here are a couple of examples from the case studies published by HEFCE:

“The key researchers were/are all PhD students and postdocs within this group.” (from an Earth Systems and Environmental Sciences submission)

“Their first premises were in the Mountjoy Research Centre, which was then the University business incubator, with two staff, Drs Arnad Basu and Ben Cantwell, both of whom had just completed their PhDs with Prof Brinkman in the Physics Department in Durham.” (from a Physics submission)

There are therefore some rays of hope that impact case studies may capture the collective aspects of scientific knowledge production better than the RAE did, with its more or less exclusive focus on publications. The same could be true of the environment element (which will count for 15% of the overall score), in which the contribution of ‘intermediaries’ in an institution to support interaction with a non-academic public can be recorded, for example.

The challenge for research leaders is to weave more integrated storylines at the level of their research units. The challenge for junior researchers, PhD students, technicians and research support staff is to ensure that they get the credit they deserve in these research impact stories and the environment submission. But will anyone ask you about this?

If you’re coming to Vitae’s research staff conference on Thursday, I’ll be speaking about these and related issues at a workshop at 12pm, together with Robert Hardwick, co-chair of the UK Research Staff Association. Come along!

We would argue that to do this, firstly, we need to know what it means to be a researcher with a global perspective. Moreover, what skills, competencies and personal attributes such researchers need to have and develop? Secondly, how do HEIs currently support and enable the development of these skills, competencies and personal attributes? Finally, what still needs to happen at the national, institutional and the individual researcher level to enable the development of researchers with global perspectives? In our VITAE workshop, we presented a collaborative project (in its early stages of development), between the Universities of Manchester, Southampton and Liverpool called the ‘Global Researcher Project’ aimed at exploring such questions.

What? - A Global Researcher.

We explored what is means to be a global researcher, more specifically ‘what kind of people would we, ideally, like to develop?’ in light of institutional, national and worldwide policy associated with Internationalisation. Six categories emerged from the group discussions; language and communication competency, cultural awareness and global mindedness, open and flexible thinking, willingness to be mobile, humility and global morality, and a future/connected/ambition-orientated.

So what? - Current activity supporting Global Researchers

We presented preliminary findings, from an online survey (completed by 8 UK HEIs), on the current activity provided to support the development of global researchers in response to the Internationalisation. All of the participating HEIs have an Institutional Internationalisation strategy or one in development. All of the participating HEIs provide training opportunities to support the development of incoming postgraduate researchers, however only 1 of the 8 has any development opportunities for their outgoing academics. Writing support for international researchers, intercultural awareness training, diversity and equality training and support for careers in Europe are examples of the activities used to support researchers that were considered relevant to internationalisation. However, as yet, it appears that coordinated concrete plans to develop global researchers is limited, and/or possibly not widely communicated across the HEIs. A similar picture emerged from discussions of this topic during the workshop, which included representatives from HEIs in Norway, Japan and Sweden. We strongly believe that this picture would benefit from a systematically, in depth exploration. Hence, the online ‘The Global Researcher - current HEI practice’ survey is still open. We would be very grateful if you, or an appropriate colleague from your institution, could complete this here. It should only take approximately 10 minutes to complete. If you have any questions about the survey or the project please contact us via lynn.clark@liv.ac.uk.

Now what? - The gaps

In the workshop, participant groups also discussed common gaps and shared ideas about how to support the development of ‘global researchers’ from the national, institutional and the individual researcher levels. Mobility and Visa restrictions at the national level, funding for training for incoming and outgoing researchers (including international summer schools assisted by supervisors), clarity over conditions and contracts for researchers, and interaction with institutional International Offices at the institutional level were highlighted as areas to that would benefit from attention. Whereas the groups stated that individual researchers have a responsibility to become more aware of, make and take advantage of, the opportunities that support and enable them to develop into global researchers, for instance learn another language, and join/create international peer group forums.

Should all be global?

The question ‘Should all researchers be global?’ was asked by a participant at the workshop. I believe this has to be individual choice. A choice informed by a clear understanding of the landscape within which researchers of the 21st century operate and the consequences to their choice to be global or not. Most importantly, all researchers should have access to opportunities, and take advantage of them were they exist, to develop as a global researcher if they choose to do so.

We were delighted to have a journalist writing for Nature Jobs attend the workshop, and subsequently the ‘Becoming a global researcher’ article appeared here.

Finally, we would like to thank all of you that have contributed to the survey and the workshop. Your input is invaluable to the project, and has inspired us to take the research forward.

Best, ‘The Global Researcher’ Project Team.

Listened to day 2 of the Vitae conference? Why not listen to a summary of day 1?

Listened to day 1 of the Vitae conference? Why not listen to a summary of day 2?

Background

The planning group for the Researchers' Forum had some reservations about whether this would be constructive, whether PIs would see any value in giving up time to contribute to a researcher development event. We worried whether the presence of PIs would inhibit the willingness of research staff to talk openly about the issues they faced relating to career development.

We had the support of the Deputy Vice Chancellor who persuaded & encouraged many research leaders to see the Researchers' Forum as important and we drafted in an external facilitator, Kate Tapper from Bud Development, to structure the event so that constructive dialogue could take place.

Kate encouraged the participants to use metaphors to illustrate what it was like to be a researcher or research leader.

The perspectives of research leaders was very interesting, they saw their role as protectors of their research staff, to shield them from the complex political issues that surrounds research in order to allow them to engage with their research unimpeded.

Researchers on the other hand felt they need more open and honest dialogue about the environment, both physical and political, in which they operated so that they felt more able to make informed career choices.

This led to the Researchers' Forum setting up two follow on events, the first in May this year focussed on where the money for research at UWE comes from and how it all gets distributed to the various activities at the institution. I blogged about this separately in an entry called "Show me the Money!"

The second event will take place later this month and is all about bringing in the experience of research leaders to share their knowledge about raising your profile as a researcher through publication strategies and cimmunicating via a wider audience.

The presentation I used to support the workshop can be found here:-

Never the Twain Shall Meet presentation

Always on the look out for other examples of engaging research leaders and managers by bringing them into researcher development events as I, along with the participants at the workshop, feel this is integral to the success of implementing the Concordat to support the career development of researchers.

At last year's Vitae Conference I presented a poster on NonZeroSum, my Innovate 2010 funded project. NonZeroSum was just an idea at that point: a training resource to help researchers think about collaboration. I wanted to make a game that would help trainers deliver great sessions on collaboration: something which would be flexible, cheap to resource and provide lots of opportunities for debriefing and learning.

In session C12 at this year's conference I will showcase the resources that resulted from the project. There will be a hands-on opportunity to experience NonZeroSum for people who come to the session. I'll talk about the development and piloting process as well. NonZeroSum has been released under a Creative Commons License. The session at the conference is a really good opportunity to discuss the benefits and opportunities in creating training resources and releasing them under similar conditions.

Session C12 will fail without YOU: I need collaborators! 80 minutes is long enough for those present to make a great contribution. Come and experience NonZeroSum; help me think about Creative Commons Licenses and their potential for training resources; take away some new ideas for engaging and developing researchers. If you want to see more about the resources before the conference then go to my website and have a look. And please comment here if you're coming, or send me a tweet!

We would like to encourage you to join us in this session to experience the same innovative experiential researcher development tool currently being offered to all Cambridge University’s 6000 graduate researchers, as well as to researchers at the Universities of Bristol, Hertfordshire and others. 

The approach has been developed from our “Experiential and Enterprise Skills Development” research programme at the University of Hertfordshire and been refined over the last year in which approaching 1500 participants have experienced one of the programmes, generating excellent feedback.

Authentic enterprise cases from the media are used as a learning vehicle and participants engage in a mixture of team and individual competitive work in a “smart simulation” they find enjoyable, energising and rapidly effective in terms of learning. After this each individual receives a confidential Personal Skills Profile which not only assesses their current capability on each key skill, but sets out a tailored personal development programme which they should pursue, to ensure that they enjoy benefits and further development well into the future, following the experience itself.

Putting the approach in place is easy and highly efficient, as it is on-line, the e-Learning is embedded, avoiding the need for specialist lecturers, and individual course administrators can readily configure their own programmes using our user-friendly web portal.

We very much hope we shall see you at the session, where you will learn about “The 9 Key Skills”; have an opportunity to experience the approach first hand, doing exactly what the Cambridge researchers have done; and see how it is being deployed in practice by leading university faculties and graduate developers.

We would like to thank the following organisations who have worked closely with us during the development and are members of our research advisory group:

University of Cambridge

University of Hertfordshire

BBC, Sony, Deloitte

Presenters:

Stephen Arnold - Entrepreneur in Residence, University of Hertfordshire

Barry Hedley - Fellow, Judge Business School, Cambridge University

Dr. Rodney Day - VITAE East of England Hub Coordinator, Associate Head, School of Engineering, University of Herts.

In hindsight, the term professional doctorate does existing research degree programmes a disservice as it implies that the standard PhD is not professional and that it’s academic emphasis belongs to some inaccessible other world unconnected with problem solving and management of real world issues. This is not the case. The research professional envisioned within the RDF should be a specialist for the current and future working world. This is where awareness of important ethical, environmental, political and economic issues combined with a set of personal development attributes will promote a researcher’s specialism and make them key workers and entrepreneurs – essential for a complex, multi-cultural globalised economy. The Researcher Professional would not be an extra qualification on top of the doctorate – it should be an embedded appreciation by all employers that in the best institutions researchers carry with them a professional standard of excellence.

Larger employers may have a tacit understanding of these elements already, particularly in technical niche industries where doctorate level knowledge is required. However, to harness the invention, problem solving and entrepreneurial skills of researchers, help them develop and impact on SME’s and wider social enterprises then a researcher professional brand should be established. It will be a key element in attracting new types of doctoral recruits and forging greater research impact within the wider economy.

Vast increases in the amount of information available to researchers on the web may seem to be of positive benefit. At the same time, questions can be raised concerning the validity of information, how to efficiently manage this information, and how to process this information coherently.

Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have become publicly established plaltforms in dealing in both personal and professional capacities. In being so well established, can they be used effectively as part of research processes and to establish new research dialogues?

If you're interested in finding out how researchers have been using technology, and what the various opportunities and challenges for institutions are, then consider attending Workshop B6 (Go digital: an introduction to digital technologies for research dialogue) at the Vitae Conference. Find out what Vitae and the Open University have being involved in, and find out whether this is something that you can champion within your institution.

Hope to see you there!

Researcher development is emerging as a field of study in its own right. The launch of the International Journal for Researcher Development in 2008 really marked this. The scholarship of researcher development now has a place to be presented at this conference. The slots for oral presentations were hotly competed for and several unsuccessful applicants are presenting posters. Proceedings from the research strand of the conference will be published in a special edition of the International Journal for Researcher Development after the conference subject to the normal peer review processes of the journal.

The research strand will be embedded within the Vitae conference programme.  This means it will be competing against some really interesting looking workshops. Do any of the presenters want to convince readers of this blog why we should come to your session?

In addition to the blog, we are also actively using Twitter and Podcasting at this years conference. For those of you using twitter, you can follow discussions and a realtime commentary during the conference through using the #Vitae11 hashtag. Podcasts will be announced both on this blog and also through Twitter and will be available on iTunes once published.