02 November 2009
By Daniel Weekes
Vitae recently published an analysis report on the aggregated results of the Careers in Research Online Survey (CROS), a survey that was completed by research staff at 51 different UK higher education institutions. The aim of the survey was to get a picture of, as higher education research staff, our views on employment, career aspirations and career development and throws up some interesting results. Encouragingly, it seems that we are all enthusiastically aware of the importance of undertaking training in research and personal development skills. However, even though the overriding consensus is that these opportunities are being made fully open to us by our employers, the number of people who have actually taken advantage of these opportunities is low. The question we as researchers should really be asking ourselves, and one I’m sure people at universities involved in running personal development skills programs will be asking, is why the clear disparity between enthusiasm and uptake for this type of training? what is stopping researchers getting engaged in these type of things? Surely its not just a case of not being bothered to undertake these courses as in other areas such as career plans we seem to be extremely proactive. I wonder if its more to do with the amount of pressure researchers are put under to quickly “get results” and publish, just to stay in employment due to the nature of short term contracts giving us a perception that we don’t have time to take these courses. Whatever the actual answer is, clearly its one that would benefit us all if we could find it...
Matthew Salois03 November 2009 at 05:40 PM
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Thanks Daniel for sharing. You bring up many good points. For me, I feel pressure not only from the research projects I work on as part of my official duties, but also from the "unofficial" research I do on my own time to try and get ahead and not let my research portfolio suffer. There is really no time to engage in the level of development that I would like to given the priorities of research and results. So needless to say, your comments definitely hit close to home!
George Whale04 November 2009 at 01:40 PM
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I don't know, perhaps it's because people realize that 10 hours of schmoozing is worth 100 hours of training.
Daniel Weekes04 November 2009 at 04:18 PM
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Possibly, but in the same study it seemed that wasn't the atitude and generally people had positive attitudes to the importance of training, and I don't things its just on this issue that engagement is low, for example the proportion of researchers involved with unions such as the UCU is also pretty low
George Whale04 November 2009 at 05:33 PM
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Yes, sorry I was being a bit flippant. I agree that we should make an effort to take advantage of training. The training offered by the universities is generally of a high standard, and usually far cheaper than you would get outside. If the training is of the wrong type (one possible reason for lack of take-up), then it's up to us to make clear what we want. I agree also that union membership is important, potentially giving contract researchers as a group a little bit of 'muscle' with which to to negotiate.