New tools to boost researchers’ careers
Europe’s research organisations are constantly striving to advance the careers of researchers and foster their creativity, innovation skills and independence. The EU’s EURAXESS network is already looking into how to achieve this and seeking new tools to facilitate career development. Against this backdrop, the EU-funded REFLEX project aimed to design a flexible and responsive career development framework that integrates already existing tools and valuable input from researchers, their employers, EURAXESS Service Centres and other stakeholders into the context sensitive model of career development support. To achieve this aim, REFLEX brought together partners from five European countries to map European policies, document existing career support measures and encourage active participation of various stakeholders in a discussion on what represents an effective carer support strategy. This led to the successful development of a career development framework and training scheme that support researchers in planning their careers and helps employers to set up an effective portfolio of career support services. The framework addresses aspects such as mobility, career counselling, networking, academic development and career opportunities outside academia. It enables researchers to choose the services they want in order to access the most ideal resources for their case. In addition, the project team conducted training workshops in different European projects linked to the scheme to familiarise stakeholders with it. REFLEX also disseminated information about the scheme and about the project outcomes to stakeholders across Europe, complete with guidelines on adapting the scheme to different contexts. Guidelines were then provided to EURAXESS and its centres, while the REFLEX online application was also developed for research institutions to facilitate implementation. Aimed at both researchers and their employers, the scheme and its networking activities will no doubt provide an important boost to career management and career development of European researchers.