ENABLing CAReErS: priming talent for success in Biomedicine

Project Information

ENABLECARES

Grant agreement ID: 101006361

DOI

10.3030/101006361

Project closed

EC signature date 13 October 2020

Start date 1 February 2021

End date 30 April 2023

Funded under

• Make scientific and technological careers attractive to young students, and forster sustainable interaction between schools, research institutions, industry and civil society organisations

Total cost

€ 318 802,50

EU contribution

€ 318 802,50

Coordinated by

FUNDACIO INSTITUT DE RECERCA BIOMEDICA (IRB BARCELONA)
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ENABLECARES (ENABLing CAReErS: priming talent for success in Biomedicine)

Reporting period: 2021-02-01 to 2023-04-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

ENABLECARES is a consortium formed by IRB Barcelona, Radboud University Medical Center, Radboud University, the European School of Molecular Medicine and the Novo Nordisk Foundation Centre for Protein Research at the University of Copenhagen. The multidisciplinary background of project team members includes university professors of innovation management and strategy, research managers, academic officers, senior technology transfer officers, data scientists, data stewards, and open science managers.

The overarching goal of the ENABLECARES project is to provide junior researchers (including PhD candidates and postdocs) in the biomedical sciences field with a series of skills that prepare them for their future careers of choice. Such need for structured training, career development and a broad training offer has been a long term demand from the junior researcher community and the ENABLECARES partners are among those institutions that are strongly committed with providing state-of-the art training adapted to their community. ENABLECARES main objectives included:

-To enhance junior researchers training programmes at the partner institutions with new and adapted courses on two emerging and highly relevant disciplines: Open Science and Entrepreneurship.
-To provide junior researchers with training on transferable skills to complement the open science and entrepreneurship itineraries, including personalised guidance.
-To set-up and implement an e-learning platform that allows combining face-to-face workshops with on-line sessions and repositories of training materials.
-To assess the quality of the programme implementation and to establish mechanisms to track participants, thus allowing analysis of the impact of ENABLECARES training on the professional career of alumni and facilitating further actions for improvement.
-To provide a sustainability plan for project outcomes, ensuring that contents and methodologies are translated into benefits beyond the consortium.

Through a combination of train-the-trainer and co-creation activities, ENABLECARES has successfully developed state-of-the-art training courses on: (i) open science and research data management and (ii) entrepreneurship and innovation management, which have been tailored to the needs and profile of each partner institution by local trainers. The development of in-house training capacity is the main added value of the ENABLECARES courses and the key to their sustainability. Being aware of the need for other EU research institutions to integrate such training into their catalogues, ENABLECARES has also put special care in developing course contents in a modular way and creating summary guidelines that will support third parties in the creation and tailoring of their own courses. Guidelines and train-the-trainer materials are available through an online e-learning platform to train additional in-house personnel to reinforce the training capacity of partner institutions as well as a key tool for other research institutions. ENABLECARES benefitted from the expertise of partners in providing career advice to researchers to develop a set of guidelines and recommendations that have been shared in the project website for the benefit of the community. A pilot survey was conducted with alumni of past innovation courses organised at IRB Barcelona, providing relevant information on the satisfaction and potential impact of such training in their careers and an opportunity to collect very relevant feedback on how to improve training courses. This has set the base for implementation of the tracking methodology at partner institutions and beyond.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The Open Science train-the-trainer strategy has trained 8 local staff members at IRB, SEMM and CPR to provide training and personalised support to their researchers. IRB, SEMM and CPR, through 2 editions of the Open Science course, have trained 123 junior researchers, including in-house researchers and researchers from partner training initiatives. The training course, especially the RDM module(s), has been tailored to the needs of each institution, with different durations, contents, and profiles of the trainers.

SEMM, Radboudumc, IRB and SEMM, thanks to the co-creation work undertaken in the project, have provided Entrepreneurship training to 83 researchers, 51 of which finalized the complete 6-module Enablecares entrepreneurship workshop in their respective institution.

ENABLECARES generated a catalogue of transferable skills training available at partner institutions . The most relevant transferable skills to complement the entrepreneurship/ innovation manager and the data steward career profile were identified, leading to the definition of training itineraries that guided the career advisors in their training recommendations to participants. All four institutes have designated staff that act as career advisors for junior researchers. These career advisors have received in-depth training through the ENABLECARES programme and have further participated in defining the best practices for implementing personalised career guidance to researchers among their institutions.

ENABLECARES partners have together delivered 12 training workshops for junior researchers. A key conclusion of the project has been the relevance of tailoring contents to the researcher community.

The key exploitable results of the project are: (i) the training materials (open science + entrepreneurship) developed by each institution which have been made sustainable through integration in local training programmes, (ii) the guidelines for third party institutions based on the ENABLECARES train-the-trainers methodology and allowing other institutions to follow on the footsteps of the ENABLECARES partners to develop their own tailor-made courses and offering personalised support to junior researchers, (iii) a summary of recommendations aimed at other research institutions and policy makers.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The actions of ENABLECARES have contributed first of all to significantly enhance the training programmes of the partner institutions with in-house capacity to support the researchers in the acquisition of highly relevant skills such as open science, data management, and entrepreneurship/innovation management. The integration of the ENABLECARES comprehensive and highly tailored courses will have an impact on the partner institutions that go beyond a simple improvement in the training offer. The support provided by trained in-house personnel on these topics, together with the high degree of personalisation of training itineraries through dedicated career advisors, will make these institutes more attractive to talented junior researchers (e.g. PhD and postdoc fellows) looking for a place to undertake a promising research career. The process undertaken by in-house personnel to develop training and optimise career support procedures arising from ENABLECARES have also had a strong effect on the policies of the partner institutions.
The experience gained by the ENABLECARES partners in the development of new in-house training capacities in Open Science and Entrepreneurship, as well as the recommendations in terms of career development support for junior researchers are of great relevance for other similar institutions EU-wide. With this in mind, ENABLECARES has put special care in the development of train-the-trainers materials that are reusable for third parties beyond the consortium.

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