Understand yourself

Taking steps to understand yourself and what you value, what motivates and gives you fulfillment, or equally being aware of your constraints, can influence your career decision-making. It will also help ensure you can be responsive when a contract comes to an end or the next job opportunity presents itself.

The Career planning toolkit can help you with this:

Review the skills you have

Recognising the skills you have acquired throughout your career may provide vital information for future decisions.

A good starting point before you begin considering progression or a new career direction is to spend time doing a skills audit and considering your current capabilities, expertise and prior experiences.

Ask yourself the following questions:

What are your current areas of expertise?
What skills and attributes do you have as a result of all of your experience to date?
Who wants the skills you have, how badly?

If you are struggling to recognise your strengths ask others, such as your supervisors, principal investigators, research managers, colleagues, friends and family for their input. Example questions could be:

What do you think my strengths are?
What careers do you think I would be suited to?
Do you think I would suit a career in my preferred area?

It is important to recognise and value the full range of experience, skills, attributes and achievements you have acquired throughout your career. Researchers can often judge themselves purely in terms of the level of success of the research project they are currently working on. If you do this it may mean that you do not always appreciate other areas of progress and development.

Make a development plan

Once you know the skills you have and where your gaps are the next step is to create a development plan detailing the training and learning you need to develop and how you might go about accessing them. This is not only about formal training courses but also where other initiatives might help your development, enhance your profile and increase your knowledge of University's decision-making processes such as

shadowing someone more senior in another part of the University
taking on a new role e.g. a committee member
becoming a Research Representative in your School

Plans should include clear, achievable targets with deadlines and should be reviewed at regular intervals. If you can't see how to achieve your aims then make sure you ask for support and consider who could help you.

Understand your skill gaps

MindTools has a useful SWOT tool that can help you to identify the skills you have that make you unique, understand the weaknesses that need development and help you to recognise opportunities that will enable you to advance your career in a variety of directions.

Skills needed to be a successful researcher

The Researcher Development Framework is a useful analysis of the key skills you need to be a successful researcher. It is structured into four domains covering the knowledge, behaviours and attributes of researchers. You can use this framework to map your current capabilities and then consider what is missing and how you might fill the gaps.