One of the main objectives of EUTOPIA TRAIN is to support the Alliance researchers, especially young talents, through a shared approach to skill upgrading and career. The EUTOPIA alliance is committed to developing joint R&I training resources open to all faculties, permanent and non-permanent staff and postgraduate students to strengthen human capital and enhance the alliance’s attractiveness and research leadership.
This purpose shall cover in the future both transversal and disciplinary skills, with the ultimate goal of offering mutualised training through distance learning modules and webinars, capitalising on each university’s existing training offer and expertise.
The EUTOPIA partner universities invest significant resources in offering training to support research and careers to the researchers community, and mutualisation would allow us to build on all the best practices and expand and diversify our collective range of expertise.
As stated in the basic principles of the Alliance, through the EUTOPIA 2050 project the vision advocated by EUTOPIA seeksed to address the profound paradox between the vision of openness of the partner universities and the limitations imposed locally for legal, administrative or financial reasons. In the EUTOPIA 2050 project, the learning communities were studentcentred and student-empowering; this may also be the objective of the training dedicated to supporting today the research community, putting earlystage researchers at the centre of our joint activities. However, training for researchers—very often disciplinary training, depending on faculties or research groups—is uneasy to identify by central services for sharing purposes at the local level, hence even more at the Alliance level. They are very dependent on research needs and can be very versatile.
As a first objective and step towards sharing and mutualising EUTOPIA training resources, it has been decided to focus on transversal skills for researchers, with particular attention to early-stage ones (PhD students, postdoctoral fellows) as these communities are growing in the frame of the EUTOPIA common programmes EUTOPIA co-tutelle and Doctoral Mobility for PhD and EUTOPIA SIF for postdoctoral fellows. The Young Leader Academy programme also offers the opportunity to develop specific training to accelerate young researchers’ careers.
Transversal skills supporting career and personal development represent the first scope for EUTOPIA training mutualisation pilot activities and scenarios.
UTOPIA universities recognise the necessity to ensure training possibilities for all researchers and staff and to promote lifelong skills upgrading. EUTOPIA may use this opportunity to offer high-quality courses on transferable skills built on the best practices identified and the needs expressed by pilot EUTOPIA researchers’ cohorts.
In the frame of the EUTOPIA-TRAIN actions of sharing best practices for and developing strategies to strengthen human capital, the first objective is to create a training offer for the EUTOPIA research community and produced:
- An inventory of the transversal skills training offers available in each university
- Assertion of the need for additional training support
- Identification of the scope and conditions for mutualisation
- Pilot cases of mutualised training for more ambitious integrated programmes at doctoral and postdoctoral levels
- An action plan for implementing integrated training at the EUTOPIA level
As EUTOPIA is now an Alliance of 10 universities, gathering more than 22,700 PhD students and 23,700 academic staff working in 874 research groups, training EUTOPIA researchers is even more challenging and will benefit from all the mutualisation or joint opportunities we may build.
A training survey permitted to reach common definitions and identify categories of trainings for transferable skills. 13 categories were collectively identified to support academic or non-academic careers:
- Digital Skills
- Entrepreneurship
- Ethics
- Knowledge Transfer & Innovation
- Leadership & Career
- Networking
- Open science & Citizen Science
- Other (languages, summer schools…)
- Personnal Develpment
- Research Funding & Project Management
- Research Integrity & Data Management
- Scientific Output & Communication
- Teaching