Dear all, just wanted to report back on a meeting I attended today which was looking at how the Roberts Agenda was going to deal with PhD’s and Postdocs (CSRs, researchers, whatever) in the coming years.

First talk was by Nick Cresswell, university programmes manager at Google. They take on a lot of postdocs, about 30% of their engineer workforce. They start relationships with them at undergrad level and when they’re doing their PhD’s through things like research awards and internships, which of course benefits both parties. It got me into thinking what an interesting concept this would be, but there are obvious barriers there in many people’s institutions. For example, my funder wanted the project done in 3 years and having an internship wasn’t a valid reason for an extension. I think if PhD’s are going to go on to industry (which we’ll have to given there aren’t enough tenured posts) then this is something that should be considered seriously. Google was founded by two PhD students (who never completed BTW) and the place is run very much like a university. There’s something called “20% time” where people are supposed to spend 20% of their time (in whatever way they see fit to manage that) on projects of their own choosing. Many of these projects end up turning into projects, so it’s win-win. This got me thinking about something else, which is “how do we reward universities for passing on their best researchers to industry?” At present the answer is, we don’t! But maybe we should. After all, in the present model the best researchers will be jealously guarded by their PI’s, encouraged to sit at their desk and produce papers, when they could be doing more good for UK PLC (as well as for themselves) in industry. It’s not all selling handguns to children you know! Anyway, thoughts in my head about industry paying recruitment fees to universities sprang to mind, as let’s face it money is the motivating factor for everything these days.

Nick Park from UK GRAD’s “Rugby Group” then gave a talk about efforts to improve skills provision for both PhD students and early career researchers. The consensus seems to be so far that for various (obvious) reasons, the former group are quite well catered for whilst the latter (us lot) are lagging behind. Fer’ instance, whilst skills training for students is monitored by the QAA as well as funders, the same is not true for research staff.

There are big questions in there like how funding should be balanced between the two groups, how to increase accountability for researcher skill provision, and what metrics to use. “Hard metrics” like uptake, satisfaction, or contribution to research outputs are very hard and have questionable meaning. It’s also worth bearing in mind that the current stream of Roberts money is by no means guaranteed…

I’ll skip through two more presentations and just pick on a couple of points I noticed throughout the day:

• Arts and humanities probably have less access to training than scientists.

• There are log books and the like for PhD students but not researchers. We risk ending up academic specialists with nowhere else to go but academia, but without the jobs being available.

• Researchers might do better from self-managed learning e.g. over web as opposed to real-world group training as was the case at postgrad level. Allows individuals to be proactive in their learning and pitch themselves to the right level, plus fit it into their lives.

• One of the UK’s universities has a program where researchers can volunteer for a charity for several days in the year.

Anyway, the take-home point is that universities, funding bodies, and government are thinking about us right now. It’s a great time to capitalise on that to make sure we’re setting the agenda ourselves.

Paul