Enhancing the postgraduate research experience: skills, employability and careers
- Date: 6 Jul 2010
- Location/venue: Edinburgh Napier University
This event, held on the 6 July at Edinburgh Napier University was designed to assist institutions in developing strategies for improving the employability and career prospects of their postgraduate research students.
The event explored postgraduate research skills, careers and employability. The programme included overviews and case studies from a range of speakers, and allowed attendees the opportunity to discuss key issues in this area arising from the Higher Education Academy’s Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (PRES) as well as the Smith report One Step Beyond.
Skills and career development is a timely issue given findings from the three years of PRES as well as within the wider context of postgraduate education in the UK. The ‘Professional development and career’ scale of PRES had the lowest mean score across all scales in 2009, with only 37.1% of respondents saying that they had been encouraged to think about the range of career options available to them, and 39.9% responding that they had been encouraged to reflect on their career development requirements. The Smith report on postgraduate education, published in March 2010, included amongst its recommendations that ‘HEIs should ensure that transferable skills are embedded as standard in the funding and design of all research programmes’ (Recommendation 7) and that stakeholders should work together to ‘establish employer needs for postgraduate skills’ (Recommendation 12). The event will addressed postgraduate research provision enhancement in the light of this context, allowing attendees to discuss and share practice with colleagues from a range of institutions from across the UK.
This event was open to anyone who has an interest in enhancing postgraduate research provision within their institution, whether or not that institution has previously taken part in PRES.
There will be other events about improving postgraduate research provision in 2010-11. Please see EvidenceNet for further details.
