Career Development Working Groups

The Academic and Professional Support Staff Career Development Working Groups focus on developing and optimising the support given to research and support staff to develop their careers. This includes organising events within the department as well as signposting to University-wide initiatives. We work together where appropriate, but also plan separate events to meet different needs of academic and professional support staff groups.

Our working groups assess, consult, prioritise, plan, and implement actions within topic areas, identify survey items and review responses. We deliberately consider how academic careers can be inclusive and represent diversity. Our working groups sit underneath the People and Culture committee. We meet at least termly.

 Academic Career Working Group members

Raihaan Patel and Emma Osborne co-chair the group.

Chloe Hooper

Professional Support Staff Working Group members

Wendy Howard is lead of the group, working with Mandy Pipkin.

Action Plan

Our group aims to provide support in a number of ways:

• Signposting events at the University and/or division levels – there are lots of events/programs happening, but sometimes they are hard to keep track of.
• Increasing awareness of different career paths – the range of possibilities, academic and non-academic, can be overwhelming and you may not know where to begin. We try and highlight concrete examples to give you some ideas on where to begin
• Provide access to job seeking skills – we provide access to training on certain skills which can improve your job search (e.g. CV workshops) via workshops/events.
• Promote a consistent process – thinking about your next step often gets pushed aside. We try to promote the ongoing planning and consideration of your career to help you be ready when an opportunity arises.

Activities

Last November was “Find your path” month in the department, delivered jointly by the Academic & Professional Support Staff Career Development Working Groups. 

Throughout November we highlighted a number of individuals with career paths across different sectors and roles in order to help you brainstorm possible routes for your own career. You can view these here (internal only).

We also hosted a talk on career development resources for researchers from the university’s Researcher Hub. Dr Chris Jeffs joined us in the common room to give an overview of services available to research staff and DPhil students. You can view the slides here (internal only).