Vitae

Future challenges of doctoral training #vitae17

/ Paul Spencer / 3 Comments

The future

A few months ago I agreed to give a presentation at the Vitae Researcher Development International Conference in September. It is scheduled for the half plenary session on the first afternoon and the title for my contribution is Future challenges in doctoral training. I have only 7 minutes to cover this topic so I am thinking about what I want to cover and what will have to be edited out!

In this blog post are is a work in progress as I sketch out some key ideas that I talked about. The slide deck used for the Vitae conference is embedded below:

Context

A bit of context in terms of the programme is probably good; there will be other presentations before mine covering the following things:-

  • A history of the modern PhD
  • Understanding the [PGR] student journey
  • Academic Apprenticeships

Future of doctoral training

It’s quite a big topic to talk about so here are my initial stumbling musings

  1. Back to the future – Any talk about the future probably ought to start with some recognition of the past – I talked about being like Marty McFly and drop in on the 2004 version of myself who was beginning to get to grips with the question of “how do we support PGRs for their future employability (even if that is outside of academia)? The first two presentations gave an overall history of doctoral education so I focussed instead on what’s changed between when I graduated and now. I think the important question that we asked ourselves as researcher developers then was “What is a doctorate for?”.  This is still a valid question now.
  2. The contemporary research environment. I talked a bit about how the environment that researchers operate in now is different to how it used to be. The drivers, the strategies, the tactics, the reward system that many supervisors navigated in their careers are not the same any more. The pace of change toward open research, the transparency in how research is thought about, designed, implemented and disseminated are a world apart. Preparing doctoral researchers to succeed in that environment is challenging because it exposes the gulf between old and new.
  3. Professionalising doctoral researchers – We have slowly been inching toward a more professionalised system of support for doctoral researchers, e.g. parental leave for PGRs, annual leave entitlement, development support. However, PGRs are still in that middle ground, treated like staff when it suits institutions and students when it doesn’t. I think a good example of this is around PGRs who teach. We could and should do much better when it comes to getting the balance right there. Are we then going to grasp the nettle and turn the whole recruitment of PGR students on it’s head and move to employ postgraduate researchers to purposefully invest in that support?
  4. Cohort based doctoral training entities (DTEs) – an important element in the doctoral training landscape and there are some really interesting things coming about because of them, particularly the diversity of people, subjects and networks. But are DTEs the future for all doctoral training? Are there better ways as we move to the future?
  5. Innovation in researcher development. There is a golden rule in researcher development around not reinventing the wheel if you don’t have to. My call to action was to talk to people and find out what you can reuse, repurpose to support PGRs.
  6. Supporting academic writing. This for me is a high impact activity that should be on everyone’s agenda. Lots of practice out there from the likes of Peta Freestone, Inger Mewburn, Pat Thomson, Katherine Firth to name just a few.
  7. I think the future can be summarised in three Cs.

Curation, Community and Camera

Programmes, workshops, action learning sets, e-learning modules. More choice, more workshops, more opportunities – this is good? Or is it? I think researcher developers have the expertise and experience to curate support resources from diverse sources and make these things as easy to engage with as possible. Video is king as the saying goes. It is becoming easier and easier to live stream video from all sorts of devices – this offers a wealth of opportunity to bring PGRs into a discussion, to build community, to help them with their development needs.

That’s all folks!

What do you think about the future? If you hopped into the time machine made from a DeLorean and dropped into 2027, what will you see?

Never the Twain Shall Meet

/ Paul Spencer / 2 Comments

I recently attended the Vitae Researcher Development International Conference in Manchester. This is a gathering of folks who are involved in the skills development of postgraduate research students and research staff where updates on policy and strategic initiatives are discussed. It also serves as a way for all of us skills development types to share practice, find out what’s going on etc.

I was leading a workshop at the conference entitled “Never the Twain Shall Meet: Bringing Research Leaders and Early Career Researchers Together to Discuss Career Development” together with an independent facilitator, Kate Tapper from Bud Development. What we set out to do was to share the experience we had of organising an event for the UWE Researchers’ Forum designed to bring research staff and their managers (Principal Investigators or PIs for short) together to have some discussions about the best way to support the career development of research staff. The main way we did this was to use metaphors to critically examine the issues around career development of researchers yet remaing objective and impersonal.

We thought this worthy of sharing because of the difference in perspectives between the research staff and their PIs was really interesting. The Prezi I used in the workshop is shown below.

 

Never the Twain Shall Meet on Prezi

We had been planning to run this development event for sometime before we did because research staff were telling us that they felt that their PIs needed to be more involved in assisting researchers to make career development choices. I was a bit nervous about how it might work because not all PIs share the same views on how high a priority should be placed on skills development (particularly of the “generic” or “transferable” nature) in terms of the perceived success of a researcher. I was also nervous about how likely it was that we could attract a significant number of PIs to a career development event for early career researchers given the other considerable demands on their time. I am not alone in sensing that trepidation as was confirmed at the Vitae Conference.

So here’s what we learned from running this event:-

  1. We needn’t have worried about the PIs & Researchers not being engaged; they were!
  2. More communication/constructive dialogue between PIs and researchers would be beneficial
  3. The perspectives of the PIs were quite different to those of the researchers
  4. The researchers wanted more information about how things work in research
  5. The PIs felt the need to shield researchers from the external strategic pressures placed upon them
  6. Researchers wanted to make the choices that were right for them as individuals, even if that meant “jumping ship” or changing course

The outcomes of this event were:-

  1. We organised a follow up event where senior managers explained how the funding of research works at UWE and how it fits together with institutional research strategy including how we are approaching the Research Excellence Framework (REF)
  2. The Researchers’ Forum has attracted more research staff representatives for the planning group
  3. The Researchers’ Forum is having an increasing influence on research staff issues at UWE
  4. More PIs and senior managers are engaging with the issues raised by research staff and are willing to contribute their knowledge/experience to research staff events

I’d really appreciate hearing from researchers or researcher development colleagues about their experience of bringing researchers and their managers together to work on improving the career development prospects of research staff.