Summer/Autumn 2017!
Well, as Douglas Adams once said. “I love deadlines, I love the sound they make as they whoosh past!” And with that I bring you the Summer Update, in November…just...
In fairness to myself, this has been one heck of a Summer/Autumn period. August started things off with my first ever face-to-face UKRSA meeting, and you came to Glasgow! We put on a brilliant sunny day and even the world bagpiping championships! I bet London never gave you that! The meeting was fantastic, thank you to everyone who made it to Glasgow, either in person or online. It was such an invigorating meeting and I think we came up with some good plans for the upcoming year. Namely, we are going to concentrate on better representation on UK funding and policy groups and opening up more of a dialogue with these groups. We will also be developing resources to help researchers better understand some of the buzzwords in academia and researcher development. We are also going to work on understanding and developing networks between researchers and research staff associations on a local, national and international level. To better manage this, we will now keep UKRSA resources at the local Vitae hubs, with the Vitae reps, in order to better give local help to RSAs in different regions.
UKRSA representation came up again at the Vitae 17 conference, with many researcher developers not knowing what UKRSA does. I really think that having resources based with local Vitae hubs will help this, and we will encourage much more communication between local UKRSA and Vitae reps, as will Vitae. With an eye on researcher developer links, you will now find a page for researcher developers on our website – here! I’ve already written a blog about going to Vitae 17, which you can read here, but to summarise…
Anna Slater presented the early findings of her parental leave study.
There is a very mixed landscape with regards to taking parental leave in the UK with many finding it difficult to take the leave they wanted, in the way they wanted.
The biggest contributor to a happy parental leave is a good, communicative relationship between the parent and line manager.
Emma Compton-Daw and myself presented a workshop on how researcher developers can help researchers ready themselves for REF2021.
Researcher developers were keen for UKRSA to shout louder to help our voices be heard by those developing the REF.
Lucy Thorne and myself, along with representatives from Marie-Curie Alumni Association, presented with a group of researchers, policy groups and researcher advocacy groups to understand how links are established between researcher groups.
Almost a week after getting home from Vitae17 and it was time to head off to Cambridge for the National Postdoc Meeting! This was a fantastic meeting and the first to be held in it’s current format. There was much discussion of how the meeting will be maintained and I thoroughly recommend getting involved in the National Postoc Meeting in London in 2018. This year the focus was on REF2021 and the upcoming Concordat review. What really came out of the meeting was the lack of knowledge there is within the postdoc community with regards to why REF is important and what our rights are in light of the Concordat for Researcher Development. UKRSA is now working on developing some concise, researcher-friendly, resources to make this more accessible to researchers. There are however resources available on the Vitae website that are really helpful in explaining both REF and Concordat.
Concordat is very much at the forefront of everyone’s thinking at the moment and we are looking forward to submitting our views to the community review in December. This is a fantastic opportunity to have our say on how researchers can get better development opportunities! I know you've all had a whinge about it at some point! So here is your chance to do something about it!
We are calling for:
1. Accountability for signatories.
2. Funding-linked incentives to improve researcher development.
3. Better training of senior staff in how to support of Fixed-term contract (FTC) staff within the principles of concordat.
4. Increased visibility of Concordat to researchers and institutions.
We’d love to hear if you have any other thoughts though! Email ukrsavitae@gmail.com
A running theme of Summer 2017 was meeting people who want to get involved. Through Vitae17, NPM, the Nature jobs expo (read Alex’s blog here) and a number of local group meetings, we have met so many researchers and researcher developers who want to be involved in our collective voice for researchers, that our last virtual meeting crashed the system – we may need to find a new way of holding these meetings if we’re going to regularly have so many people! A very exciting problem to have!
For now that’s me signing off – I look forward to more UKRSA fun and games next year and would like to wish all of our members and supporters a very merry holiday period and a happy new year!
