Abstract

Pathways to Funding is a training scheme that allows early career researchers to learn skills necessary for an independent research career directly from highly experienced pre-award funding managers.

At the time of the programme’s inception, these funding managers, who worked within the scope the Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary national Research Centres (predominantly AMBER, ADAPT and CONNECT) and the Trinity Long Room Hub, identified gaps in the training opportunities for early career researchers, particularly those participating in Marie Skłodowska Curie Action (MSCA) COFUND programmes, where, there is a need to provide early career researchers with the knowledge and skills required to become independent researchers. While transferrable skills training for post-doctoral researchers and junior academics does exist, it is often institution-specific and, often, does not cover topics that equip early career researchers for their journey towards research independence.

To fill this gap, the funding managers developed a comprehensive training course, that leverages their combined decades of pre-award experience in developing highly competitive proposals and applications at the national and international level, to provide training in a tailored and targeted way.

While the primary focus was originally on Postdoctoral Fellows participating in SFI-Centres- hosted COFUND programmes (such as EDGE and ADMIRE), the current training programme also caters to senior postgraduates and junior academics who are looking to up-skill in these key areas.

Training is provided in simple modules and covers areas such as career progression planning, funding opportunity identification and horizon scanning, as well as providing practical training in areas required both for project implementation and for future proposals, including open science and data management, ethics, budgeting, and project management. Sessions are presented by funding managers who have a particular interest in the given areas, meaning that participants in the training benefit not only from the knowledge they impart but also the passion with which they impart it. The sessions also try to be “funder agnostic”, meaning that the training can be applied to any funding scheme at the local, regional, national, or international level.
This talk will outline how the scheme was originally developed and how the extensive experience of the pre-award managers now trains early career researchers in areas that have traditionally been under-resourced. The talk will also discuss the expansion of the programme beyond the original SFI-Centres remit and how it is now open to researchers in most higher education institutions in Ireland, as well as being incorporated into new EU-funded projects, especially within the scope of the WIDERA Twinning programme.

This talk will focus in particular on the benefits that can be achieved through transversal transfer of knowledge, by proposal development experts contributing to the implementation-phase training of the next generation of independent researchers. It will also highlight the benefits of bringing together the expertise of funding managers who work in STEM and AHSS. Following from this session, participants and attendees will understand the imperative for developing the programme and the steps taken to develop it into the comprehensive suite of training modules it has now become.