Collaborating to be more competitive: how universities can work together to improve doctoral skills training

This blog was kindly authored by John Miles, CEO, Inkpath

As Chinese universities surge in the Times Higher World University Rankings, provoking prognostications of a ‘new world order in global dominance of higher education and research’ (Phil Baty speaking to the New York Times), the global challenge for universities in the UK and beyond is clearer than ever. They face a constant competition for doctoral talent, research funding and international partnerships, in which they are asked to demonstrate both excellence and efficiency, despite significant financial pressures. Expectations around doctoral provision – employability, wellbeing, interdisciplinarity, digital capability – continue to grow, stretching staff time and resources for researcher development and other types of support.

In this context, collaboration between institutions appears not merely desirable but necessary. Pooling provision, sharing infrastructure and coordinating training offers clear potential efficiencies. Yet collaboration may sit uneasily alongside competition. After all, why would you choose to share the very activities that differentiate your doctoral proposition? The usual answer, of course, is that collaboration can unlock additional funding for studentships (such as via UKRI for UK institutions) and skills training costs.

From one-to-many…

The doctoral training partnerships and centres arising from UKRI’s funding competitions set the template for collaborative doctoral training initiatives in the UK. They follow a one-to-many logic in which a central unit curates provision, sets priorities and distributes opportunities outward. They have proved successful enough to be renewed: several collaborations funded via UKRI have now seen their third re-incarnation.

The benefits of these collaborations are meant to ‘trickle down’ to wider doctoral cohorts. But the fact remains that the reach and impact of these collaborations on doctoral skills training at a national and international level will always be limited by the resources they have available to them. A large multidisciplinary Doctoral Training Partnership might train four one-hundred-strong cohorts across its lifetime, and a single-discipline Centre for Doctoral Training might train a tenth of that number. It is difficult to imagine a truly national network for doctoral skills training emerging without a well-resourced central hub, complete with staff, infrastructure and a multi-million-pound budget.

…to many-to-many

While one-to-many approaches may prove impractical to scale, many-to-many collaborations have the potential to have a broader impact at much lower cost. These types of collaborations – in which partners provide training to one another on a reciprocal basis – remain relatively rare in doctoral training. Not because they lack conceptual appeal, but rather because they are difficult to operationalise. The Bloomsbury Postgraduate Skills Network (BPSN) offers one example of how such a model can function in practice. Conceived by University College London but constituted as a partnership of peers, the network enables doctoral researchers at multiple institutions to access skills training offered by partner universities. Rather than one institution acting as a provider to others, each partner contributes a selection of its provision to the wider network.

In principle, this model is attractive. It allows institutions to share the more generic elements of doctoral training – professional skills, career development or research methods, for instance – while retaining responsibility for discipline-specific or locally distinctive provision. It also creates opportunities for interdisciplinary interaction and peer learning across institutional boundaries, enriching the doctoral experience in ways that single-institution programmes might struggle to replicate.

In practice, however, making this work at scale is administratively demanding. Many-to-many collaborations run up against the reality that universities operate different systems, processes and data standards. Opportunity discovery, event booking and reporting are typically embedded in institution-specific platforms that are not designed for inter-institutional use. In the absence of shared infrastructure, coordination often defaults to unwieldy email chains, spreadsheet sharing and informal workarounds – none of which are ideal for the staff running the network or for the students trying to navigate its offerings.

How to make a many-to-many collaboration feasible

Shared digital infrastructure can shift this equation. By providing a common coordination layer across partners, platforms that are explicitly designed for multi-institutional delivery make it possible to distribute administrative effort rather than centralise it. Crucially, this does not require the creation of a powerful central hub; instead, it enables a devolved model in which partners retain autonomy over their own provision even as they contribute to a collective offer. The result is a form of collaboration that is both scalable and institutionally sensitive: generic training can be shared across the network, while distinctive strengths are amplified rather than diluted.

The potential benefits extend beyond efficiency. Networks of this kind can support completion and wellbeing through broader access to support, foster interdisciplinary exchange by bringing together researchers from different institutional cultures, and enhance the overall coherence of doctoral provision across a region. Perhaps most importantly, they allow universities to collaborate without surrendering their institutional identities. Collaboration here is not a process of homogenisation, but a way to make singular strengths more visible and more impactful.

This is not collaboration on the cheap. Shared infrastructure, governance and coordination require investment. But the scale of that investment is of a different order to the multi-million-pound commitment that might bring forth a national doctoral training programme. When executed well, many-to-many models point towards a future in which groups of universities can collaborate in ways that allow them to ‘punch above their weight’ internationally, combining resources to enhance doctoral training without constructing additional, centralised superstructural bureaucracies. In a competitive global environment, the ability to collaborate effectively may itself become a differentiator – not in spite of competition, but as a means of sustaining it.