Showcasing departmental support for Early Career Researchers

Environment and culture

In summer 2022, the new School for Arts and Creative Technologies (including Music and Theatre, Film, Television and Interactive Media) held a series of events with researchers to bring the two departmental cultures together.

Early career researchers designed and ran their own ReACT (Research in Arts and Creative Technologies) events to share their experiences and consider the challenges and opportunities for postdocs.

A panel of researchers from a variety of academic backgrounds and career stages from the Universities of Canterbury, Sheffield, Newcastle and Leeds shared their views on precarity, mental health, bullying and harassment, gender and gender reassignment, work-life balance and research as creative practice.

Researchers welcomed the opportunity to feel recognised and to have an opportunity to shape the agenda.

The Department of Archaeology runs an annual departmental survey on culture and reviews the outcomes at their EDI committee on which there is an early career researcher representative.

In addition, all staff complete unconscious bias training and all line managers are encouraged to complete effective line manager training and performance review training.

The department also actively supports researchers in developing their career and applying for fellowships, and has created guidance for managers to support research staff induction.

Employment

The School for Business and Society has developed a number of processes to support wider career and development and promotion prospects, including appointing deputies to all major administrative roles to enable more junior and mid-career staff to train up into more senior roles.

In addition, the new role of Career Development Fellows (CDFs) has recently been developed.

CDFs are junior academic roles designed to provide scope for postdoctoral scholars to develop their academic careers.

Each CDF will negotiate a tailored teaching and research ‘development plan’, agreed with the CDF Coordinator and the relevant Head of Group (HoG) at the end of their first month in post.

The aim of the development plan (with 6, 12 and 22 month review points) is to ensure that CDFs achieve a level of performance that will support their employability, with protected time to write and publish their research alongside developmental teaching duties that are closely linked to their research expertise.

Researchers can also apply for support from a dedicated ‘ECR Strategic Development Fund’ to support research and impact-related training and networking.

In the first year, £3,000 will be allocated to this fund with further funding subject to review.

The Department of Health Sciences have refined their redeployment policy such that over 95% of contract research staff either have their contract extended or are redeployed within the Department.

This is achieved through a series of early meetings exploring career options, skill set and redeployment within the department conducted with the Head of Research, HR partners and those whose contract is at risk.

Additionally staff are encouraged to apply for promotion and senior staff are encouraged to recommend highly performing staff for internal awards such as ‘Making a Difference’ and ‘Rewarding Excellence’.

The new school of Physics, Engineering and Technology (PET) are using the Concordat to underpin the creation of their ECR culture, actively discussing issues like the use of fixed term contracts at senior management level.

Professional and Career Development

The Department of Biology has developed resources for PIs to support their discussions with researchers as part of the annual Performance and Development Review (PDR) process.

Key priority areas include discussion about citizenship and the roles people wish to take on, mentoring, managing workload and effectiveness, and identifying impact from research.

The department has also actively encouraged staff with relevant research portfolios / projects to undertake secondments or fellowships in areas of policy and/or industry interest (eg Biosciences Yorkshire Enterprise Fellowship, Royal Society, Royal Academy of Engineering).

Ahead of the PDR, postdoctoral researchers are strongly encouraged to make use of the University's 'Looking Beyond Horizons' career development resources.

This tool is designed to enable researchers to conduct a skills analysis, to consider career options and to create a Professional Development Plan (PDP) to elicit career development discussions during the PDR.

To promote uptake and facilitation of the PDP, all new PIs are now assigned an academic mentor who will provide support and help navigate the systems in the new location - this is particularly useful for ECRs.

These relationships are cultivated over years but can also be transient in nature (eg person A mentoring for issue X; person B for job Y).

The Biology Postdoc Society has been active since 2011 and has been the blueprint and inspiration for other ECR forums at York.

The short-term nature of research contracts means that there is a relatively quick turnover of ECR committee members.

To circumvent this academic staff and experienced researchers have been recruited as core members to stabilise and enable continuity and sustainability of the society.

As a result, there has been a significant increase in the last 12 months of networking and career supporting activities within the department including the ‘Shaping the research culture in Biology: the Postdoc Voice’ championed by the Head of Department and a number of initiatives including Postdoc Appreciation Week, for which the society invited testimonials from PIs recognising the contribution of their researchers collated on Padlet.

Postdoc profiles are also tweeted to raise awareness of individual researchers’ contributions to the culture and environment in the department.

Plans are under way to transfer the success of these initiatives to other departments via events such as the York Researcher Festival.