Effective Sustainable Policies for career Development in research — Report on the Session at ESOF2020

This year, Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF) 2020 took place in Trieste (Italy), but mostly virtually. During this conference, Gábor Kismihók chaired a session entitled “Effective Sustainable Policies for Career Development in Research,” which was held virtually on the 3rd September 2020, and can still be re-watched on YouTube.

The session started with Gábor presenting the various contributors of the session: Eva Hnatkova, Open Science Coordinator at the National Library of Technology and at the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague; Auréa Cophignon, Project Manager of Doctoral training and career development for a MSCA Doctoral Programme (COFUND) at Univerisité Còte d’Azur; and Fran Cardells, Big Data and Analytics expert at the World Economic Forum.

Objectives of the meeting

Gábor continued presenting the structure of the meeting, the history of the MCAA, and the “Declaration of Sustainable Research Careers” that was first held during the MCAA Annual conference of last year (February 2019) involving more than 400 researchers, and was presented at EURODOC. Gábor then introduced the objectives of the session: “to raise awareness, timeliness, and consequences (industry competitiveness and well-being) involve major opinion leaders, researchers, research funders, and policymakers to come up with concrete, hands-on recommendations, and good practices during this session,” involving all the participants in order to discuss the above mentioned four points, with concrete and actionable policy actions.

Declaration of Sustainable Research Careers

At this point, Gábor went through the declaration (which you can read it here), explaining the four pillars of the Declaration itself, underlining the actual problems:

• Provide sustainable career prospects for researchers: presently, there are limited possibilities of a long term career in academia, and funding are predominantly short-term;
• Deploy career management services at organisations employing researchers: presently, there isn’t really a guidance system to help researchers on ‘alternative’ career opportunities — there should be increased support from the institution;
• Put more emphasis on transferable skills training and recognition: presently, there is a constant mismatch between academic and non-academic skills set, even though the transferable skills are critical to strengthen integrity and employability;
• Provide a wide variety of networking options and services in and outside of academia: presently, it was observed that a higher level of specialization results in most cases in mental and physical isolation — there is the necessity of helping the researchers in creating new networks, especially the Non-EU, which may have even more problems.

Before heading to the general discussion, Gábor ended his presentation by outlining some of the already existing projects to help young researchers and to be used as tools to update the declaration:

• Policy recommendations: a) towards responsible career assessment and b) Manifesto for the future of work and organizational psychology;
• Training development throughout the SciLink Foundation;
• Enhancing the professionalization of researchers through open science, communication, and mental health skills training, and collaboration with OEduverse project and all the important stakeholders involved;
• Providing personalised training on research mental health and career development by using AI-based learning recommendations and online mentoring and a more recent project, the Oscar project, that is meant to start very soon;
• Community building projects and a COST action framework entitled ‘Researcher Mental Health Observatory’ (ReMO), which started at the end of September 2020 and will continue for four years.

At this point, Gábor started the general discussion involving the other three speakers.

Panel discussion

1. Provide sustainable career prospect for researchers

The possible solutions that were discussed involved:

• Increasing the contract of doctoral programme from three to four years, because a 3-years programme cannot be enough to complete all the trainings (also improving the set of transferable skills) and the mobility which are related to an MSCA ITN;
• The government, stakeholders and finally universities need to provide better conditions for researchers, improve their policies, and give more stability to all the fellow researchers, also in terms of stipends, social security, and pension scheme.

2. Deploy career management services at organisations employing researchers

Gabor started the discussion on this point with a question on responsibility: “Is this issue the sole responsibility of the institutions? What are the roles of supervisors or research fellows?”

Eva underlined that the responsibility is on everyone, including the government, institutions, and researchers. Everyone has different rules: Institutions have management and career services, supervisors are expected to give transparent guidelines, and researchers themselves have the responsibility to see what is on the market.

In addition, Auréa added that it is fundamental to collect more data on careers and market opportunities for researchers, and that there should be the availability of more permanent positions in academia. Moreover, she added that specific training to explain what is outside the academic world, should be carried out.

The discussion then continued around a comment that rose from the audience regarding industry and the presence of industrial partners in some of the European funded projects. On this point, Fran underlined that industry and academia have common interests in developing high-quality researchers for some specific need, and that some programmes in which Industry and Academia collaborate already exist, both at the EU level but also in terms of people hired by a company who then follow an academic programme.

While concluding the discussion on this topic, Gábor underlined the risk of a possible conflict of interest (i.e. publications for academia, product development for industry for example) when involving companies, and the need for the supervisor to work positively with the industry and driving the whole story of the project.

3. Put more emphasis on transferable skills training and recognition

In this discussion, everyone mostly agreed that there is a necessity to improve the skills of a person outside academic skills. Nowadays, some institutions did not put enough emphasis on transferable skills, which are particularly important for the researchers, and thus should be part of a doctoral programme. Moreover, there is the necessity of keeping industry and academia connected, for example having at least two supervisors from two different fields to ensure interdisciplinarity, usually one from academia, and the other one from the industry, to permit the candidate to get to know both the environment.

The discussion then underlined the difficulties of actually measure these soft skills, and the necessity of developing more of these skills, not only during a doctoral programme, but they should be taught earlier in the career of a student, as they are a set of skills that are fundamental in order to find a position in the industry.

4. Provide a wide variety of networking options and services in and outside of academia

Gábor opened the last open point of discussion by saying:

“If you are a good networker, it leads you into a good career, but then, who is responsible for networking activities?”

The answer that was given by Eva is that Institutions should provide a platform, like a job fair, but also the researchers need to be proactive in order to increase her/his net network, also by using social networks such as LinkedIn. Moreover, a question from the audience suggested that it could be an idea for a researcher to choose a longer doctorate programme funded by a company that involves a compulsory internship. Auréa underlined that this could be a great idea to involve the private sector, but also that similar programme structures already exist (for example in her institute a PhDHub exist), and in general could be implemented in other institutions.

Conclusions

Gábor wrapped up the session and thanked all the participants, both from the panel and all the people who attended the session, inviting them all to get in touch with him (Gabor’s email: Gabor.Kismihok@tib.eu) in case there was the need to further discuss some of the topics.

A final round table was done, and the final key messages were:

• The necessity of improving the transferable skills training and at the policy level the necessity of assuring the quality of the doctoral programme;
• The necessity to improve doctoral training because the world is changing fast. Moreover, Doctoral candidates should be prepared for the world outside academia to face global challenges;
• Encouraging institutions to develop networks for industries, NGOs, governments in order to create innovations;
• Include or develop proper career placement metrics.

Ruben Riosa is an animal nutritionist currently working as a PhD student at the University of Bonn/University of Glasgow, where he is part of the MSCA ITN project MANNA. His project focuses on dairy cow’s nutrition and physiology. In the MANNA network he is also the Scientific copywriter. He is deeply interested in science communication.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rubenriosa/
Website: https://rubenriosa.com/