New Professional Development Resources available for SEB members
New Professional Development Resources available for SEB members!
The SEB is excited to release our new on-demand professional development resources to support our members at every stage of their career. This includes a video and PDF covering time management skills, and a five part mini-series exploring evaluation of impact for projects such as public engagement events and activities. Read on to learn more!
Time and Project Management
A career in research is a unique work environment. It depends heavily on self-motivation and organisational skills to get things done. How effectively you spend your time in the lab, field, or working on a research paper is entirely up to you. In most cases there isn’t someone telling you how to organise your time and structure your day. This creates a lot of freedom, and the flexibility is a perk of the job, but it also means you need to figure out how to stay productive on your own.
Success in your research degree and career beyond is not just about dedicating time to your work, but managing that time well so that you are as productive as possible helping you to keep a healthy work-life balance. In the Time & Project management video and accompanying slides, Dr Jamie Gallagher discusses his top tips for coping in the academic world and managing big projects to take some of the stress out of academic research.
Evaluation of Impact
In recent times, there has been a growing interest in the “non-academic” benefits or “impact” of research. Funding bodies, institutes and governments are increasingly asking for evidence of the societal value of their research investments. Evaluating the impact of your work and public engagement activities is also key to reflecting on what is working well and where improvements can be made. The process of collecting evidence and reflecting on the project, will help you to understand the dynamics and effect of your work, and help inform future projects or approaches. Used correctly, evaluation is a valuable tool that enables you to learn from your experiences and to assess the impact of your work. Our evaluation of impact mini-series focuses on how you can use evaluation to measure the impact of your work to support engagement effectively.
Across the five-part mini-series, you will learn how to differentiate between outputs, outcomes and impact and understand how you can set useful objectives for your project and put in place plans to evaluate your success in achieving them. We also explore the kinds of evidence you can gather as part of that evaluation. This is the perfect accompaniment for anyone applying for our new Outreach Grant or Diversity Grant as evaluating impact is a key aspect to the judging criteria. So why not get a head-start by viewing this on-demand content!
All these new resources can be found by logging into the MySEB area of the website and scrolling down to view the “Career Resources” tab. We hope you enjoy them!