Planning your development
The Researcher Development Concordat is a national policy document that sets out expectations, roles and responsibilities for how researchers are recruited, supported, and developed. It also sets out an expectation that you as researchers engage in a minimum of 10 days of professional development per year (pro rata).
Taking time to reflect on and map your experiences, consider your ambitions, and identify aligned development opportunities will support you to get the most out of this protected time to focus on your professional development.
As you progress in your development and career, these priorities will evolve, so it is important to continue to reflect and adapt your development plan.
What does Professional Development look like?
Your professional development will include a mixture of practical experiences, mentoring, career exploration, and reflective practice, as well as self-directed learning or formal ‘workshops’ or ‘training’.
Knowledge exchange
This could include:
- Patient and public engagement: the Public Engagement team can help you.
- Engagement with policy makers: the Glasgow Centre for Public Policy can help you.
- Innovation and Commercialisation, including training: teams in the Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Engagement Directorate can help you.
Career awareness and exploration
This could include:
- Engaging with Pathfinder events such as Work Cafés and Careers Workshops
- Find out about careers in a wide range of sectors, including Academia, via Pathfinder Career Narratives
- Use the career coaching and resources available to research staff from the Careers, Employability and Opportunities team
- Role shadowing of colleagues or people in roles that interest you
Supervision, Teaching and Leadership
This could include:
- Develop and gain recognition for supervision, including associate supervision
- Access opportunities within your discipline to design and deliver teaching
- Develop your teaching skills, for example through programmes offered by Academic and Digital Development
- Identify leadership opportunities and programmes such as the Talent Lab
Committee, Policy and Skills Development
This could include:
- Being a Research Staff representative on a School, College or University Committee
- Joining the Research Staff Assembly
- Joining the Research Culture Commons
- Joining your College Researcher Network
- Organising conferences, seminar series, skills development, careers or networking events
Training and Upskilling
Training is just one small part of your researcher development. However it is still valuable. This could include:
- Completing mandatory training required for all staff
- Attending workshops on skills such as research IT packages, impact, networking and more
- Engaging with self-paced upskilling through University subscriptions to online learning platforms
- Attending training offered by your disciplinary or professional body
Your Professional Development Plan
Below are suggested frameworks to support you to map all that you do and contribute as a researcher, take a step back and identify areas of priority for you and your career ambitions to build on your expertise, experience and research leadership.
The Vitae Researcher Development Framework (RDF)
The Vitae Researcher Development Framework (RDF) is a framework which captures the knowledge, behaviours and attributes of researchers. It has four domains:
Domain A: Knowledge and Intellectual abilities
Domain B: Personal Effectiveness
Domain C: Research Governance and Organisation
Domain D: Engagement, Influence and Impact
Each domain is further broken down into descriptors and phases to represent stage of development.
Pay, Performance and Reward
The annual Performance and Development Review and Academic Promotions processes are linked and designed to support you in planning and navigating your career development.
They set out criteria for promotion and provide time, space and framing for conversation on your development annually.
Familiarising yourself with these policies and the criteria for promotion can support you in creating your development plan and in evaluating and prioritising potential opportunities.
UKRI Resumé for Researchers (R4RI)
The UKRI R4RI is a type of Narrative CV. Narrative CVs more broadly are designed to allow a wider range of researcher skills, experience and contributions to be evidenced in relation to a researcher or research team. The UKRI R4RI is divided into four modules:
Module 1: Contributions to the generation of new ideas, tools, methodologies or knowledge
Module 2: The development of others and maintenance of effective working relationships
Module 3: Contributions to the wider research and innovation community
Module 4 – Contributions to broader research/innovation-users and audiences and towards wider societal benefit
You can access more support for Narrative CVs via Pathfinder
6 Steps to Successfully Navigating Your Development
Step 1
Take control of your career and professional development.
- Reflect on your prior experience
- Consider your career ambitions
- Identify opportunities that align with your career stage, and aspirations.
Step 2
As a member of Research Staff you are expected to engage in a minimum of 10 days of professional development a year (pro rata).
- How you spend that time will be unique to you.
- Make sure it aligns with your development priorities and career ambitions.
- Seek out constructive conversation(s) that support you to identify and prioritise areas of focus.
Step 3
Think broadly about your development.
- Engaging with workshops and courses should not be the sum total of development you will experience during your time at UofG.
- Consider the experiential opportunities that would support your career and professional development.
Step 4
Embed and contextualise your learning by working with others at UofG through:
Step 5
A very important part of your development is derived from direct experience in your field.
- Collaborating
- Communicating your Research
- Developing your Research Vision
Step 6
This is a process. Reflect on your progress, what have you learned? What do you still need to learn?
You can find support for reflecting on progress through conversations with:
- Your PI or line manager
- Your peers, mentors
- Specialist services such as Careers, Employability and Opportunity