How we work

Membership

Organisational membership is available to Higher Education and research institutions internationally. Other organisations with a commitment to the development of researchers may be eligible for affiliate membership. See our pages about membership.

Enquire about membership for your organisation.

Events

Vitae open spaces event Most of our events are aimed at those with responsibility for supporting the professional and career development of researchers. As well as our annual international researcher development conference we run a series of smaller Vitae Connections events dedicated to sharing practice and continuing professional development, each having a specific theme. A springtime series of networking seminars is one way for our members to input to our programme for the following academic year.

Our programme of events is based on input from our members.

Training and development capacity building

We provide leading edge, high quality training courses, specifically designed for researchers, and train the trainer programmes to build sustainable capacity for your organisation - using a variety of delivery methods.

We can deliver workshops on topics to suit you and your researchers, using an interactive and experiential approach, with optional virtual support
We have a number of established programmes for all stages of the researcher journey, from beginning research to developing a research career
We can develop tailored training programmes suited to your needs or specific topics, recent examples include:

Becoming an enterprising researcher
A mentoring approach to research supervision
Building your research profile.

Our train-the-trainer method has been tried and tested internationally and enables an institution to build in-house capabilities and drive innovation in the training of researchers. Participants practice co-facilitating and experience a workshop from a participant perspective, with additional support including optional, ongoing mentoring and recognition of trainers by Vitae.

Get in touch if you'd like to discuss ways we could help you.

Consultancy

Vitae can work with your organisation in an advisory role to address your specific needs on policy and researcher development provision. Vitae offers consultancy in areas such as:

Benchmarking and organisational gap analysis
Strategy and policy development
Talent management and development
Training of trainers to build sustainable organisational capacity
Doctoral training programmes
Employer engagement strategy
Recognition of training, researchers and organisations
Evaluation of the impact of professional development
Partnering with organisations on funding bids.

Contact us to enquire about consultancy.

Collaboration

We work in many ways with other organisations with a stake in researchers' professional development. Recent partnerships have included co-development of new resources, joint research projects, event sponsorship, mutual promotion agreements and paid advertising.

If you have a great idea for how we could work together, we'd love to hear from you!

RDF Planner

This online app is a powerful professional development tool that can help individual researchers to identify strengths, action plan, review achievements and create a portfolio of evidence. It's available through subscription to organisations or to individuals and is designed to be portable if the user moves roles. The Planner is based on the globally acclaimed Vitae Researcher Development Framework.

Vitae organisational members are eligible for a discounted subscription. Organisations can also request a free trial and can purchase a subscription for all or for a sub-set of their researchers.

Benefits for organisations include:

Records of assessment and progress can be used in career conversations
Signpost researchers directly to institution’s courses and resources
Access to Vitae support, guides and resources to engage researchers in professional development and career planning