Exhibition

The British Council creates international opportunities for the people of the UK and other countries and builds trust between them worldwide. We are a Royal Charter charity, established as the UK’s international organisation for educational opportunities and cultural relations. Our 7,000 staff in over 100 countries work with thousands of professionals and policy makers and millions of young people every year through English, arts, education and society programmes. 

Euraxess UK is part of the European Commission’s Euraxess initiative, a service network involving 40 countries across Europe. Euraxess aims to remove the barriers to free movement of knowledge within Europe, to strengthen cross-border mobility of researchers and staff, and to provide researchers with better career structures. 

Euraxess UK can help find funding to bring researchers to UK institutions, and give them information about practical matters when they arrive. The Euraxess UK website has information for incoming international researchers, as well as a searchable database of international funding opportunities. For more information visit www.euraxessuk.org or follow us on twitter www.twitter.com/EuraxessUK  

The Idox Group

The Grants arm of Idox has worked with organisations across the UK for over 30 years to provide Europe's leading grants and policy information service.

Its suite of products includes:

• GRANTfinder 4 Education – the UK’s only grants and policy information service that offers a one-stop shop for key projects such as widening participation and business spin-offs as well as R&D funding opportunities 
• RESEARCHconnect and RESEARCHconnect International – complete, specialised funding solutions dedicated to the provision of research funding opportunities 

Reporting in excess of 13,000 funding opportunities – from local to European funding and wider international programmes – Idox’s funding solutions allow clients to maximise their chances of success through the use of tools that enable them to identify relevant opportunities and manage, track, save and share content with colleagues and professionals outside of their organisation.

Idox representatives will be on hand at the Conference to deliver stand demonstrations and provide full information on the products.

KKI Associates - Entrepreneurship and Transferable Skills Training

KKI Associates trains, inspires, and motivates students and HEI staff in entrepreneurship and commercial skills. The skills they learn in these workshops will also improve their employability and improve their understanding of factors affecting research 'impact'.

KKI training has a high impact and a distinctive training style.

We try to:

• start at the basics
• go very fast
• use interaction and case studies, incentives and prizes
• demystify and explain jargon

Because KKI has been working in this area for 20 years, we can show examples of people having been directly inspired towards entrepreneurship. For a cohort of (typically Ph.D and young post-doc) staff who receive KKI commercialisation training, we have a reasonable estimate of the outcomes:

• the portion who will consider starting some form of commercialisation activity within a few years
• the portion who within 4-5 years will have started companies and obtained significant grant and investment funding
• the portion who will have achieved 'commercial success' - a thriving company or perhaps an investor exit (which can take 10 years from that first training programme)

Stats on the last group suggest that about 1 in 150 trainees goes on to 'become a millionaire' - slightly better, we believe, than the chances that the average student has of becoming a professor!

Come to our stand and:

• see some videos of training workshops in operation
• meet some recent students whom KKI has trained and mentored to success in the BBSRC Biotechnology YES competition
• enter our 'build a tower, build a team challenge' - prizes will be awarded at the end of the day!

Nature Masterclasses

Nature Masterclasses provides training in scientific writing and publishing, delivered by editors from the Nature journals.

The training is available as face-to-face workshops and as an online course.

The workshops are hosted by institutions and offer their researchers one-one-one interaction with Nature journal editors.

The online course takes researchers through the entire publishing process, with modules such as “Data Management”, “Plagiarism”, and “The Editorial Process”.

Contact us to find out how Nature Masterclasses can support your researchers and improve the quality of your scientific publication output. Plus, register for a free sample of the online course.

Services complementing the training include: Nature Research Editing Service.   

Research Fortnight

The publishers of *Research Fortnight provide you with Total Funding Awareness via their online platform *Research Professional.

A subscription to the service includes:

• Thousands of open calls for all disciplines from over 8,000 funders
• A searchable database of previous grant winners from key funders across the globe
• Authoritative news, analysis and comment from a large global team of journalists
• Proven know-how on research funding bodies, programmes and policy development to help in the application process and win more proposals

Developed over the last 20 years to tackle the real needs of researchers. Hundreds of institutions across the world consider *Research Professional to be the vital ingredient in building a successful research enterprise.

Vitae conference attendees can sign up for a free trial by visiting http://info.researchprofessional.com/free-trial

Progress Platform

ProgressPlatform^TM is an interactive, web-based system for recording, monitoring and reporting on student progression and skills training activity. The system is extremely flexible and can be tailored to the specific needs of each institution. The range of uses extends beyond postgraduate students, as undergraduate, CPD, other taught students and research staff can also benefit from the system’s flexibility.

ProgressPlatform^TM is transparent and easy to use, offering the potential to enhance data quality, promote student-supervisor interactions and stream-line processes for administrators and supervisors. Key benefits of the system include a booking and management area for skills training activities and a single point of truth for progression, bringing together information from numerous sources/databases.

We maintain a dialogue with our customers and are constantly developing upgrades in response to evolving requirements. Key elements of the Vitae RDF are embedded in the skills training functionality and there are plans to develop this further in the future. Another recent development is the roll-out of a bespoke reporting module which enables administrators to create reports on any information in the system.

Please visit our trade stand to discuss your requirements and book a demonstration, at no obligation or cost.

Scientific Editing Company

Dr Joanna Young, The Scientific Editing Company (www.scieditco.com)

The Scientific Editing Company specialises in providing training workshops for PhD students and researchers on research communication, publishing, enterprise and other key transferable skills. We offer over 15 different workshops and they are informed by our own academic research experience and from working with students and staff in a range of institutions around the UK and Europe. Our workshops are very popular with participants and each workshop can be tailored to different groups and subject areas on request.

In addition to our training workshops, we offer an English editing and statistics service for researchers. We accept research manuscripts, book chapters, technical documents and theses. We also host the annual ReCon conference and hackday (www.ReConEvent.com) in Edinburgh each year which focusses on research communication and careers. Next year, the 5th Annual ReCon conference will be from 30.06.17 - 01.07.17. Videos of the talks from previous years are available online via the website. 

SkillsForge

SkillsForge, which has been developed by the University of York over the past 13 years, is a commercially available software as a service for HEIs.  SkillsForge provides the functionality to reflect, review, record, monitor and report upon postgraduate student progression, skills acquisition and general development activities.  It possesses a fully integrated course booking system, skills framework, bespoke forms and workflows and integrates with existing student records and HR systems. Through innovative collaborative design, our aim is to guide, support and evidence the success of HEI students, staff and supervisors.   

Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE)

The Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE) is an international learned society concerned to advance understanding of higher education through the insights, perspectives and knowledge offered by research and scholarship. 

It is a specialist publisher of higher education research, through journals such as Studies in Higher Education, Higher Education Quarterly, Research into Higher Education Abstracts, and a book series. The Society also supports special interest networks for researchers, and it organises an annual higher education research conference and a parallel conference for postgraduate and newer researchers each December . To find out more, including membership details, visit www.srhe.ac.uk 

Sumac

 

“Developed and managed by the University of St Andrews, SUMAC is an online mentoring and coaching platform which provides effective data management for scheme coordinators, while streamlining scheme administration.  SUMAC has a range of features allowing hosting of multiple schemes, each tailored to meet specific needs. SUMAC helps scheme coordinators to manage scheme membership and supports the whole scheme lifecycle, from sign-up, through matching, and the creation and management of partnerships.

The development of SUMAC has been based on St Andrews’ experience with mentoring and coaching over 10 years, and on the participation of Universities across the UK in the SUMAC Beta testing programme. 

Currently there are over 150 diverse schemes hosted on SUMAC across more than 30 UK institutions.

Cost-effective access to different levels of service is now available by subscription, with free 3 month ‘full-access’ trials offered to all institutions.” 

Taylor & Francis

Taylor & Francis Group partners with researchers, scholarly societies, universities and libraries worldwide to bring knowledge to life. As one of the world’s leading publishers of scholarly journals, books, ebooks and reference works our content spans all areas of Humanities, Social Sciences, Behavioural Sciences, Science, Technology and Medicine. We are delighted to be this year’s headline sponsor of Vitae’s 3MT® national competition.  

 Thinkwrite

For over a decade, ThinkWrite has delivered 1-day training courses enabling participants to communicate with greater effectiveness and efficiency, whether writing or speaking. At the centre of ThinkWrite’s process is a need to 1) understand the expected structure of a particular document, 2) specify the key message that needs to be conveyed and 3) determine specific requirements of key decision makers. 

Last year around 1000 participants attended our courses, with almost all giving good to exceptional feedback scores. In fact, many participants explicitly state that these were the most helpful, informative and enjoyable courses they had ever attended. Participants range from post-graduate students to senior academics and team leaders, and courses are frequently booked both by central training co-ordinators, individual departments and specific research teams. 

All ThinkWrite courses are delivered in an interactive style and anticipate that participants will actively join in during sessions. Most courses are delivered to 12-15 participants, giving space for small amounts of one-to-one interaction between presenter and participants. On occasions we deliver to conference groups, as well as providing flexible one-to-one Skype consultancy.

UK Council for Graduate Education (UKCGE)

UK Council for Graduate Education is the leading independent representative bodyfor Postgraduate Education in the UK. Its mission is to be the authoritative voice forpostgraduate education in the UK, providing high quality leadership and support to itsmembers to promote a strong and sustainable postgraduate education sector.

UKCGE promotes:

• the interests of graduate education across all disciplines
• quality measures for graduate education and research conducted in HEIs
• the effective leadership and management of postgraduate students
• the effective provision and funding of graduate education
• the status, education and training of postgraduate students
• equal opportunities for students in graduate education
• the professional development and status of staff and supervisors in HEIs

The Council is:

• an authoritative voice for the HE sector on postgraduate activity in the UK
• a developer and communicator on policy relating to postgraduate education
• a developer and promoter of best practice in the delivery and administration of
• postgraduate programmes
• a provider of appropriate information, services and publications for these issues

UK Research Staff Association (UKRSA)

The UK Research Staff Association (UKRSA) was established in 2010 to provide a collective voice for researchers at Higher Education Institutions across the UK

UKRSA is supported by, and works closely with, Vitae. It aims to empower research staff to take control of their own careers and contribute to policy.

What we do is:

• support local and regional research staff associations and networks
• contribute to national policy, through active  representation on committees and steering groups, and by advising Vitae
• interact directly with research funding bodies
• provide a UK voice on the International Consortium for Research Associations (ICoRSA) 
• provide resources such as our Guide to Research Staff Associations 
• undertake and report on research projects into the impact of Research Staff Associations and postdoctoral funding
• engage members of research staff in their professional and career development