I’m a bit of an interloper on this forum, as I’m a historian, not a scientist. However, I can’t find any similar forum focusing on arts/humanities researchers. (If anybody knows of one, I’d be very interested to know about it.)

I’ve signed up with the aim of asking just one question, which is this: is it just me, or does anybody else find the Roberts Agenda (obliging us to spend 10 days p.a. on generic skills training) a thoroughly demoralising imposition, and a waste of our time and the public’s money?

Actually, I know it’s not just me: I work in a small department containing 5 research fellows covered by these regulations, and we all feel pretty much the same way.

The problem is that the system is explicitly designed to give young researchers a foothold on the career ladder. None of us in my department fit that model: our ages range from 46 to 60 (with two on the brink of retirement), most of us have come to academia as our second or even third ‘careers’, and none of us have any real interest in serious career progression. In my own case, I dropped out of a ‘proper’ professional career (taking a considerable drop in salary, status and security), and made a positive decision to ‘follow the dream’, which in my case was to do front-line historical research – specifically, at that stage, to get a PhD. To help pay the bills, I took a low-level research assistant job, which, since I got the PhD, has been upgraded to a research fellowship. The last thing I want at the moment is further ‘training’; or at least, not at the intensity the Roberts Agenda demands.

We seem to have three possible options:

a) To play by the rules, and subject ourselves, with ill grace, to sitting through umpteen hours of training sessions which we don’t want to be in, and which we feel are irrelevant to our lives. (And which, if we’re there under protest, are most unlikely to do us any good.)

b) To ignore the demands, and ignore the hail of insistent (and at times bullying) emails, letters and phone calls which follow. As I understand it, although we are under a contractual obligation to undertake training, we are unlikely to suffer any direct personal penalties if we refuse: however, our department may well have future grant applications turned down, which would obviously have repercussions for our future prospects within it.

Or c) To lie; or at least to grossly exaggerate, inflating 10 minute casual conversations into 2-hour ‘briefing sessions’, and so on. (Given that academic research is all about honest and objective appraisal of the evidence, whereas ‘real world’ success tends to depend on putting a positive spin on mediocre materials, maybe these are precisely the sort of ‘generic skills’ they’re trying to foster).

One further point. In my own time, I continue to pursue my personal research projects, and have a pretty good publications record (which obviously can’t do my employment prospects any harm as and when I do move on). However, I really don’t need ‘training’ to do this, just time; so is there any way I can channel any of my Roberts requirement into that?

I suspect that the worlds of the sciences and the humanities work so differently from one another that a lot of this won’t ring bells with many members of this forum (and much of the underlying problem is that the Roberts Agenda has clearly been designed on a science model). However, any comments or advice would be gratefully received.