THE Awards are now open for entries

As every year since its conception, Vitae is pleased to be supporting and judging THE award for Outstanding Support for Early Career Researchers. This award is given to the individual, team or institution that has developed the most innovative or exemplary scheme to enhance and develop the transferable and careers skills of postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers.

The submission should outline an example of support for the career development of postgraduate researchers and/or research staff. The judges will be particularly interested in support that:

• is of an innovative, exemplary or collaborative nature 
• has tangible outcomes (for example, what researchers have done as a result) 
• relates to the implementation of the concordat to support the career development of researchers. 

Entrants should summarise in no more than 500 words what they were trying to achieve, how they set about achieving it and how the impact of the support is measured and evaluated.

You can enter or nominate a candidate by 1 June 2014.

Last year’s winner in the Vitae-supported category was Queens University , Belfast for its compulsory Certificate in Entrepreneurship programme.

Facilitated by Professor David Gibson, this programme enables researchers to take responsibility for their own career by seeing both themselves and their research as an enterprise and creating innovative opportunities to apply their research to non-academic settings.

The winners will be announced on 27 November 2014.