Weekend Reading: Keeping professional development continuous for researchers

By John Miles, Founder and CEO of Inkpath.

Writing in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Iker Sainz, Josu Solabarrieta and Isabel Rubio investigate students’ tendency to drop out of sports and exercise when they go to university. They conclude that: ‘Lack of time (or dedication to other activities unrelated to physical activity) and fatigue seem to be the main factors for dropping out.’ Something similar happens, I would suggest, when researchers make the step from being a postgraduate student to becoming a member of research staff, which often means walking the pre-tenure tightrope in a precarious postdoctoral position. This time, rather than exercise (although that may suffer, too), it is skills training and professional development that can get neglected. If this is the case, what can we do to help keep professional development continuous for researchers?

Investment in training is essential

In its recent Blueprint for change from the UK’s universities, Universities UK (UUK) highlights the existential challenge the UK and its universities face in fostering a ‘world-leading research and innovation system’, and notes (among many other factors) the importance of training the next generation of researchers. Of course, in this context, ‘training researchers’ means enabling them not only to pursue and complete their programme of research, for which specific skills and methods may be required, but also to develop the skills and professional nous that will help them secure and thrive in meaningful and rewarding careers.

UUK notes that ‘Investment in postgraduate research training is essential to our future research success and we must not neglect it,’ but the impact of research training arguably goes beyond only research success. Yes, researchers who have been trained well stand ready to benefit universities and research. But they will benefit the world beyond universities, too, either through their research, or directly, by stepping confidently into a range of career trajectories beyond the sphere of higher education.

Student respondents to the 2023 Postgraduate Research Experience Survey appear to agree with UUK on the importance of training. AdvanceHE notes in its analysis of the survey results that ‘In 2023 we have seen a strong increase in the availability, and take up’ of professional development-related activities, and has observed elsewhere that student engagement in general (among undergraduates, at least) has bounced back from pre-pandemic levels.

Dropping out

The undergraduate and postgraduate skills engagement picture puts research staff engagement in training and development into sharp relief. According to Vitae’s analysis of its 2023 Culture, Employment and Development of Academic Researchers Survey (CEDARS), engagement of research staff in professional development activities ‘is low with only 16% of research staff spending the 10 or more days recommended in the Researcher Development Concordat. A quarter of research staff (and a similar proportion of other academic staff) report spending less than one day a year on professional development activities’.

Some things we might try

So how can we get researchers back into training? First of all, I suggest, we need to understand the nature of the problem better. Surveys can help with this, of course, but live engagement data shared between universities could provide the basis for better decision-making. For instance, at Inkpath we work with the Bloomsbury Postgraduate Skills Network, which facilitates the sharing of training opportunities across a range of London universities. Training collaborations like this could provide an organisational foundation for sharing useful anonymised engagement data and understanding the problem properly.

The actual changes we can make are numerous, and range from small and simple to large and challenging. On the large end of the scale, the CEDARS survey analysis highlights a lack of time for development as an important factor in training dropouts. Increasing the amount of time available to researchers for professional development and rewarding them for making good use of it will help to re-introduce an element of structure to development opportunities that may be lacking at present. This is an institution-level change which needs to be supported by senior management and is outlined clearly in the Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers.

We might also try making some changes on a smaller scale, which could be easier to implement. We could:

• Make opportunities more easily accessible, via a single online portal if possible, and use systems tailored to the researcher audience. Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) and HR systems are used regularly by students and professional services staff respectively, but can be alienating for researchers, not least because they use them infrequently.
• Relate training to research career stages and needs, both across the institution and in individual departments, taking a thematic approach, tagging up content with metadata to make it easily searchable and drawing it into pathways to encourage sustained engagement.
• Make training achievements portable: many postdoctoral researchers will move on quickly and want to take their profiles with them. A physical or online transcript will help, and accredited development programmes and real qualifications make things more tangible and valuable.
• Identify and recruit researchers who have benefited from training and introduce them to others as champions of the agenda (if they agree to do so, of course).
• Take training feedback and evaluation seriously and use good tools to raise the feedback survey return rate. 30% is a good return rate, but it is entirely possible to raise that to 90% and above, as we have seen in our work with universities.
• Make it easy for administrators, programme designers and facilitators to make their magic happen. Administration of programmes should be simple and efficient and they need the right systems and support to help them do this.

If, as UUK states in its report, the training of researchers is vital to the success of research (and, by extension, universities and the world beyond them), we need to start addressing this problem right away. Just like exercise, the benefits are manifold, they will serve us all well later in life, and you can never start too soon.