Planning your training

When you have identified your training aims you should match them with training providers. You should consider the training opportunities that exist within your lab, office or department, and that are available to you via your supervisor. Some opportunities will be formal training courses, others might be hands-on sessions provided by other researchers as they are needed. Your university is also likely to offer a number of university-wide training opportunities which you should find out about. Specialist ‘summer schools' may be provided by groups of universities and other providers, discuss with your supervisor, who may have suggestions. Lastly Vitae provides regional and national events, especially in transferable skills.

It is also important to think about development opportunities available beyond academia through professional and disciplinary organisations, work and voluntary experience and independent training providers.

Remember: not all training has to be provided by courses or workshops. You might set yourself a variety of self-study tasks such as practising with a computer typing tutor, reading a book or visiting a country to practise your language skills.

Writing your plan

Once you have matched your training aims with training providers you can create a plan of what you are going to complete and when. Ask yourself the following questions:

• when do I need to have received this training by?
• is it something that I really need to do as quickly as possible to start my research (e.g. learn about databases to be able to store data) or is it something that I need for a particular purpose and that can be scheduled appropriately (e.g. viva training).
• when is this training available?
• how much time do I want to allocate each week/month to training?
• what are my other time commitments?
• how can I fit my training plan around my research, work and life obligations?

As a guide, we suggest you might spend about a day a month on training, throughout your career in research. However you may find that at the start of your doctorate you need to spend more time on training than you will towards the end.