Comprehensive Training Programs for Researchers: From Students to Leaders (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: To understand the real training needs of students and professionals in the research world, it's helpful to visualise the journey that takes them from their undergraduate studies to a career in a research-intensive role in, say, academia or corporate R&D. Along the way we can identify some typical personas and get a sense of how their skill sets, and hence their training needs evolve as they progress through their careers. Many students get their first taste of research at the senior undergraduate level. As graduate students, they're likely to be running experiments of their own, communicating their results to peers and professors, and possibly even publishing in scholarly journals. The transferable skills they acquire at this stage of their educational career will be crucial in setting them up for success in the professional world, whether in academia, industry, or some other branch of research. Recent studies of undergraduate research in the US have highlighted some pervasive skills gaps in this area. To help solve this problem, we're developing a new training programme called Research as a Transferable Skill, focusing on critical professional competencies for students who are planning to pursue a career in a research-related field. A key outcome of the training is the student will understand the benefits of developing what we might call a researcher mindset while at college. We believe this can significantly enhance their prospects for long-term employability and career success. PhD level students come under increasing pressure to deliver real research results, and ultimately to publish those results in the literature. Unfortunately, the skills required to plan and execute well-managed, reproducible research are often not formally taught in graduate research programmes. Generally, the student learns them through what is in effect an apprenticeship programme, with or without close guidance, depending on the support offered by more senior colleagues. To address these needs, we're developing a new training programme called Advanced Research Skills, in which graduate students and early career researchers will master the essential skills that will help them navigate the critical phases of the research workflow cycle, including, for example, how to develop a testable research hypothesis, how to plan a research project, how to execute a well-organised, safe, reproducible project, and not least, how to communicate research results through publication and presentation. As researchers become more experienced and acquire expertise in their chosen fields, as well as more general professional skills, they typically spend less time at the laboratory bench, and more time on the administrative and financial aspects of running a research programme. They're more likely to be focused on getting their next round of research funded, managing teams of more junior researchers, and developing fruitful collaborations with senior colleagues, as well as managing and advancing their careers. Our training programme, called Professional Skills for Research Leaders, is designed to assist senior researchers who need to deploy these more general skills in complex research environments. Research ethics, or more broadly, responsible conduct of research, remains a critical consideration and a mandated training requirement for researchers throughout their experimental careers. Key considerations in this area are things like academic integrity, ethical approaches to the use of human and animal subjects in research, and the proper management and analysis of research data. Epogeum has a highly regarded training programme in this area, which has been widely adopted in research institutions across the world. In summary, this series of integrated training programmes from Epogeum is designed to provide continuous access to training resources at the right level and at the right time. By developing these programmes in close collaboration with research institutions, we're providing a unique offering that meets the true training and development needs of researchers across the entire career arc, from advanced undergraduate students to research leaders.