Vitae and the Learning & Professional Development Centre

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Posted on 22 May 2013

The Learning and Professional Development Centre (LPDC) co-ordinates the university’s engagement with Vitae: the UK organisation that champions the personal, professional and career development of researchers in higher education. Vitae provide a wide range of resources and workshops for researchers at all levels of their career, as well as for supervisors and researcher managers, researcher developers and trainers, and policy-makers. Their work is supported by Research Councils UK (RCUK) and UK HE funding bodies. Keele is a member of the Vitae Midlands Hub with Jen Smith from the LPDC acting as our key contact. Jen sits on its Advisory Group, through which regional institutions share and develop practice.

In 2010 Vitae built upon the Research Councils’ Joint Skills Statement to create the Researcher Development Framework (RDF) and the associated Researcher Development Statement (RDS), which the Research Councils endorsed as setting out the knowledge, behaviours and attributes of effective researchers. The LPDC have recently administered a small-scale pilot of a new RDF online planner, which meant that up to 50 Keele researchers could use the professional development tool from January to March in order to provide feedback to Keele and Vitae on the usefulness of the planner and areas for further development.

This year the LPDC intend to work with Research Institutes and the Keele Postgraduate Association to map Keele’s current doctoral researcher development provision on to the RDF in order to ensure that central training complements that provided by the RIs and to identify opportunities to build on current activities. We will also refresh the LPDC webpages so that workshops for researchers explicitly highlight which areas of the RDF they relate to.

The LPDC will continue to work with our Vitae-endorsed external trainer, Professor Rodger Linford, to provide the annual series of core skills workshops for postgraduate researchers. We will also work with other services at Keele to explore the in-house delivery of researcher development courses that Vitae has created for institutions to adapt and deliver themselves.

You can find out more about Vitae through their website at http://www.vitae.ac.uk

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