Research Services

What is new?

In 2019, Senate agreed that all PGR students should be able to demonstrate the following eight Core Competencies upon successful completion:

• Communication, networking and collaboration.
• Personal skills (time management, resilience, problem-solving, critical thinking).
• Professional skills (academic defence, academic writing, project/resource management).
• Leadership
• Ownership and understanding of the scope for career development options.
• Understanding the importance of impact and translation (public engagement, enterprise and IP).
• Responsible Research and Innovation, ethics and data management.
• Qualitative skills and/or quantitative and digital skills depending on discipline.

How does this impact students and supervisors?

To embed the eight Core Competencies, an updated Training Needs Analysis (TNA), Development Plan and Evidencing Development summary will be introduced for new students from September 2020. Continuing students may choose to opt in to the new system or continue with the existing TNA summary and ePortfolio summary.

What are the advantages of the new approach?

The new documentation is streamlined, consistent across all Faculties and centred around the Core Competencies, providing greater clarity to students regarding training and development expectations. This clarity is particularly important for those students with interdisciplinary projects. This will in turn result in an improved student experience and allow students to focus on those skills that will be most valuable to them in the next stage of their career.

The changes described here will support supervisors to have more straightforward conversations with students regarding development and training; it was with this in mind that the decision to proceed with implementation for September 2020 was taken.

The table below contains links to relevant documents:

Staff-targeted documents are available in the Research Services webpages.