1. Developing as a researcher @ Strathclyde
A Postgraduate degree is the pinnacle of your higher education, but it is just a milestone on a journey, not an end point. A career as a researcher requires constant development to incorporate new knowledge and skills, and to help you respond to the one constant you’ll face – change. We’re going to tell you how the University supports your development, but more importantly we’re going to tell you why you need to take control of your development from the start.
Dr Steph Colvan
RDP manager
Dr Campbell Reid
PG Cert RPD lead

2. Expectations of PGRs Based on Strathclyde PRES 2019 data
The annual PRES survey gives us an insight into where our PGR population wants to work. When asked what type of career do you have in mind?, most of your peers indicated that they are aiming for careers in academia, and this doesn’t change too dramatically over the course of a degree. People also become more sure of what they want to do as they approach the later stages of their degree. The proportion of students who want a research career outside of academia is around 18%. This is a consistent finding across survey years, and across the higher education sector as a whole.
Based on Strathclyde PRES 2019 data

3. Where do PGRs go? 3.5 Years after graduation Outside academia
Outside academia
In academia
3.5 Years after graduation
But when PGRs are surveyed 3.5 years after graduation, the majority of them are now working outside academia. This varies by discipline, but it can be as high as 70% for the physical sciences and engineering. This trend continues throughout people’s careers, and the percentage of people with PhDs who become full-time academics with permanent contracts is considerably lower than 30%.

4. Be prepared for anything
Plan to be an academic if that is your ambition:
But be prepared for a career that might take you into industry, the third sector, policy, government...
Be prepared for a career full of possibilities
So how do you reconcile your ambitions with the reality? You should absolutely work towards your goal of becoming an academic if that is your ambition. But you should also be prepared for career changes that take you outside of academia. It might not happen immediately, you might change your mind. Your circumstances might dictate what choices you have, opportunities you can’t imagine will cross your path. The trick is to be ready for whatever your career and life throw at you. Fortunately, a research degree is valuable anywhere research is conducted and employers want knowledge creators, problem solvers, critical thinkers.

5. How do we know this? This is the Researcher Development Framework, which was created by Vitae. Vitae is a UK wide organisation backed by UK Research and Innovation responsible for supporting the professional development of all researchers. Vitae conducted a study into what makes a successful researcher, and grouped the skills, knowledge and attributes required into four broad domains. Domain A focuses on the knowledge and intellectual abilities required to conduct research, while domain B covers the personal qualities needed to help you be an effective researcher. Domain C concerns the standards, requirements and professionalism required to deliver research, and Domain D is about how you demonstrate the influence and impact of your research and engage others. The RDF breaks each domain down into more focused sub-domains, and each sub-domain into individual descriptors. This makes the RDF a very comprehensive competency framework that uses language familiar to employers inside and outside academia, and provides you with a common language to articulate your skills. The Researcher Development Programme handbook in your welcome pack provides you with information on the skills associated with getting started in research.

6. Training needs analysis
Training and development plan
Plan
Engage
Evaluate
Record
Reflect
How have you applied what you learned?
What do you want to get from your activities?
The professional development cycle
You can incorporate the RDF into your professional development, as it plays a role in each stage of the professional development cycle. Professional development is ongoing process that you should regularly review and update. It normally starts with a plan of the training and development you think you need over the next period of time and the opportunities that are available to you. When you come to engage with the activities you have planned, it is important to go into those activities with a clear idea of why you are doing and what you want to get out of them. This means that when you come to evaluate your activities, you can think about what you learned and how you can incorporate that learning into your practices and strategies. It’s a good idea to record your evaluations and progress regularly, and think about how you could demonstrate your progress to someone with examples and evidence. The final part of each cycle is reflection. This is critical to fully understanding your development journey and informing the next iteration of the cycle. When reflecting on your development, you should consider what you have engaged with, what you learned from it, how you can evidence your progress, but most importantly how you can apply what you have learned. Alongside this, you should refer back to your original plan to determine how well you have met your needs, and what you still need to work on. As you are just starting out on the first cycle of your professional development as a postgraduate researcher, you can perform a training needs analysis. This will help inform your training and development plan. The RDF provides the framework to measure yourself against.
Record your progress, think about how to demonstrate it
What did you learn? How can you use it?

7. Identifying your development needs
Measure yourself against the RDF:
Where are your strengths?
What do you still need to develop?
What level are you at, and what level are you aiming for?
When do you need to develop the skills?
You can use the RDF to take stock as you start your research journey. What skills do you think you already have? Are those skills at an appropriate level for postgraduate research? Are there any areas that you know you need to work on just now? Are there any skills that you think will be important in the future? You can also consider your current level of competence and the level of competence you want to reach by certain time points – the end of your first year, the end of your degree. Another useful point to consider is when do you need the skills? You don’t want to hold your research up or not be prepared for a big opportunity because you don’t have a specific skill or knowledge in time. The output of a training needs analysis should be an honest appraisal of you current skill levels across a range of skills that are important to your research and your career aims. This will be different for each of you, and the RDF is comprehensive enough but flexible enough to accommodate all of you. Once you have an understanding of what skills you need to work on, you need to consider what opportunities there are to help develop those skills.

8. How do you develop skills?
You can develop skills through almost any experience:
Look out for opportunities (internships, conferences…)
Get involved (DRG, seminars, Doctoral School events)
Take the time to evaluate and reflect on your experiences
If you take the time to understand what you want to get out of an activity, and evaluate what you learned from the activity, almost any experience can help you develop relevant skills. This is particularly true for professional development where you are looking to develop skills that are transferable to any situation and complement your knowledge and technical base. So you’ll find that a research degree at Strathclyde will provide you with lots of experiential learning opportunities. Some of these will be associated with typical academic practices, like publishing papers or presenting at conferences, but might also include working with external organisations or engaging with the public. You’ve already heard from Esraa and Lewis about different types of opportunities they’ve taken advantage of, and when you go back to your schools and departments you’ll hear about many more from other students. Keep you eyes open for opportunities, and consider everything as a potential learning experience. Make time to evaluate experiential activities against the RDF and your own development plan. Your conversations with your supervisors about your training needs should incorporate your professional development needs. Your supervisors will have an idea of the technical and theoretical knowledge you need to develop, but you need to tell them what your development needs are and ask them what experiental opportunities are available to you.

9. How do you develop skills?
You can also attend training for specific skills:
Department/School events
Faculty events
Scottish/National training networks
Online
External organisations
Researcher Development Programme
But you might want to focus on specific skills in a more formal setting. Your department/school may offer events and training, as will your faculty. There are Scottish and National training networks for different disciplines, and there is a wealth of online training and external organisations that may offer what you are looking for. In addition to all this, the University offers all postgraduate researchers training through the Researcher Development Programme.

10. Researcher Development Programme
A transferable skills development training programme:
Mapped to the RDF
Available to all PGR students
Offers a range of formats and durations
The Researcher Development Programme focuses on transferable skills development training that is appropriate for students from all disciplines. All courses and workshops are mapped to the RDF, and come in a range of formats and durations to suit. The programme is very popular, so you’ll need to be organised and book places on any workshops you think meet your training needs. You can read all about the programme in the handbook you’ll find in your welcome pack, and look out for the monthly GradNews . This will update you on the upcoming RDP workshops, but also any external opportunities that might be relevant. Remember that the RDP is only one way to develop your skills and it’s worth considering all of the different types of opportunities you’ve heard about today when developing your plan.
Your welcome pack contains the RDP handbook with full details of the courses available and how they map on to the RDF

11. How do you develop skills?
Once you know what opportunities are available, create a plan:
That meets your training needs analysis
That fits with and supports your research plan
That meets your longer term career aims
Attend Planning Your Professional Development!
Now that you know what skills you want to develop and what and opportunities are available to you, you can outline your training and development plan. The plan should help you develop the skills you’ve identified from the training analysis in a timely way, it should support your research plan, and it should be realistic and fit with your other priorities and requirements. If you know what you want to do after your PhD then you can start thinking about what skills you will need for your first job, but if you don’t know what you want to do – don’t worry. Just make sure you are progressing and covering skills from all areas of the RDF. If you want some help with the training needs analysis and creating a training and development plan, you can come along to the Planning Your Professional Development workshop offered by the RDP.

12. Formal development requirements
All research programmes have formal requirements:
EngD – 1 year taught programme
Professional Doctorates – 180 taught credits
MPhil – 20 credits of researcher development
MRes – 60 credit taught programme
PhD (SBS) – PG Certificate Research Methodology for Business and Management
PhD – PG Certificate in Researcher Professional Development
All research degree programmes at Strathclyde have a formal training and development component. If you are doing an EngD programme, you will complete a 1 year taught programme before starting your 3 years of research. Professional Doctorates will complete 180 of taught credits that cover research methodology and discipline specific content. MPhil students need to complete 20 credits of development training that can cover formal taught courses to experiential learning depending on the needs of the individual. MRes students will complete a 120 credit taught programme, and Business School students have to complete a 60 credit Postgraduate certificate in Research Methodology for Business and Management. You department or school will give you details of the formal requirements of these programme. If you are completing a PhD programme in HaSS, Science or Engineering, you have to complete a 60 credit postgraduate certificate in Researcher Professional Development. The PG Cert RPD is a formalisation of the process of professional development cycle we’ve described, and rewards and recognises the training and development you undertake alongside your research.

13. As 80% of the people in this room will complete the PG Cert RPD, it’s worth briefly describing how it works. Don’t worry, you’ll receive a welcome that will provide you to the resources that explain and support it, and the links are also included at the end of this presentation. The PG cert has 5 classes. The first 4 classes are mapped the four domains of the RDF, and the sub-domain and descriptors of each domain form the learning outcomes for the class. The fifth class is an elective, and anything from the first four classes can contribute to the elective. The knowledge and intellectual abilities class is given a 20 credit weighting to reflect the importance of these skills, the other four classes are rated at 10 credits each. Beyond this, the PG Cert RPD doesn’t bear much resemblance to a standard PG Cert. There is no time table and no formal curriculum, and the classes are empty containers that you fill with your individual development activities. You can contribute almost any activity to one or more of the PG Cert classes, as long as you can evaluate the activity and identify which of the learning outcomes it helped you develop. So keep the PG Cert in mind when you are performing your training needs analysis and creating your training and development plan, and use the dedicated systems to evaluate and record your activities as you go along. We expect people to record 20 credits worth of activities a year, but these can be distributed across the classes in any order that fits with your plan. Once you have filled a class with the minimum number of credits, you will complete the final class assessment. This takes the form of a reflective essay, and is the final part of the development cycle. This is the opportunity to reflect back on your development in a particular domain, and understand what you have learned and how you have applied that learning to your research, but also how it can help your future career. It also allows you the space to consider how well you have met your plan, and what areas you want to develop in next. From a very practical point of view, writing about your training and developing and giving examples of putting those skills into practice is ideal preparation for job applications and interviews.

14. Take control
Regardless of your programme, make sure you are developing the skills and experiences you need to achieve your aims
Plan, evaluate and reflect – this will help you sell your skills and experiences to employers
Professional development is part of any career, so get started now
Regardless of what type of programme you are on, you need to make sure you are taking the time to consider your development needs and making the time to engage with activities that will help you develop. Your supervisors and schools and departments and the Doctoral School and Researcher Development Programme can provide guidance and help create the opportunities for development, but only you can take responsibility for your own development. So take the time to plan, evaluate and reflect – even if it is only to understand what you have achieved and how you can sell your skills and experiences to future employers. You’ll find that all careers and jobs have elements of professional development, so it is never to early to get started.

15. Further information Researcher Development Programme Website
Booking system
GradNews – monthly newsletter
Strathclyde Doctoral School
Website
PG Certificate in Researcher Professional Development
Website, FAQs, Handbook and guides, Drop-in sessions