Abstract

Many institutions have various teams providing different kinds of training or workshops to researchers, such as presenting CVs, developing research proposals, public engagement or impact. At the University of Glasgow, the Overseas Team supports researchers to engage with Horizon Europe. We organise workshops to help prepare researchers for their applications., focussed on the funding schemes.

How can we better integrate our support offer to researchers within the wider institution, and what are the benefits? Other teams organise, deliver and curate a wider range of researcher development activities, courses and events. The Overseas Team integrated its Horizon Europe workshop offer into this wider research development programme.

This made our workshops more visible; any researcher at the University could book a place on our workshops at any time, by browsing the researcher training catalogue, allowing us to reach a much wider audience with less effort. We also helped to advertise and point researchers we work with towards the wider catalogue of researcher development courses. This also led us to collaborate much better with colleagues in other teams, who are also supporting research. In this session, we would like to reflect on this experience, the benefits and challenges.

How can we use the breadth of available training to better prepare our grant applicants? Could we participate in courses organised by other teams, to contribute our Horizon Europe promotion and communication – ‘hopping on’ to other colleagues’ courses and events, to deliver our own content? Could we achieve even more by working on researcher development in a more integrated manner with other teams and colleagues across our institutions – for example identifying candidates for specific funding opportunities by the courses they enrol in?

Working across departments, maximising synergies with colleagues working on researcher development, public engagement, communication, impact and other topics can bring several benefits. For example, we could point colleagues working on an MSCA proposal towards another team’s course on public engagement, or ERC interview candidates towards a course on presenting you and your research online. Such an approach could multiply the benefit or impact of the many researcher development activities taking place across the University. How could we organise to make this more strategic approach possible, and to make it successful?

We would like to share our achievements to date in integrating our workshops and events within the wider institutional catalogue, of seeking to contribute to a more streamlined researcher development offer. We’d also like to hear from colleagues about their experiences of working across departments, for researcher development or other research support activities and to consider the opportunities in taking a more integrated approach.