The irony of writing a blog, to encourage you to read our blog, is not lost on me. However, this is the approach we want to take in the Researcher Development team at the Institute for Academic Development (IAD), to keep researchers and colleagues informed of developments in our programme, updates on projects, hear reflections on our work and receive hints, tips and advice on different topics.
The IAD has dedicated research staff webpages and we lead on maintaining and updating the University Research Staff Hub. Both are extensive, including all the most relevant information on workshops, events, resources and support to help researchers in their role.
However, we are aware that it’s often difficult to know when our website has been updated with new initiatives, and when new resources have been added. For this reason, we want researchers to be aware of and use our blog, to find out about updates on areas of work and new support.
This blog aims to highlight how you can navigate and use our blog to find what you need.
Get some Careers support
Our research staff careers consultants are now blogging regularly about different careers topics, from academic CV tips and tackling academic interviews to signposting to news resources and events. You can find all our career themed blogs under the ‘careers’ category. In addition to this, we also have a dedicated section of the blog called ‘Diverse Career Paths’. This section includes a series of blogs with careers information on roles and sectors beyond academia. Our Career Management webpages will be our ‘master copy’ of resources and videos, and the blogs will be talking about what is happening, providing up to date thoughts and reflections on topics that crop up in 1:1 conversations.
Find out about different initiatives, events, and opportunities to get involved
We also use the blog to update on events. For example, our Edinburgh Technical Collaboration event that ran for the technical community and our New Staff Meet ups which run every 2 months for all university staff. We’ve had several guest blogs from researchers and different support services. We update on Concordat developments and our writing support, including our annual WriteFest programme.
Our Researcher Realities initiative, which has been running since May 2023, has a dedicated section on the blog (Researcher Realities) with updates on events, with the most recent being an event on unsuccessful grants. We have a couple of thematic blog series, #PostdocResearcherRealities (PAW) celebrates our postdoc community with different researchers providing reflections of the realities of postdoc life at Edinburgh, and Researchers’ Journeys is an initiative from the Long-Term Research Network on ‘Long-Term Researcher Careers’.
Who is our audience?
The researcher development team work to support research students and research and academic staff with their personal and professional development at the University of Edinburgh. However, we also encourage and support the sharing of good practice in researcher development more broadly. In addition to supporting our researchers, we hope this blog can also help colleagues at the University who support researchers as part of their role stay updated on IAD developments. We also intend for this blog to be used as a way of sharing practice with colleagues at other Universities working on similar projects supporting researchers.
Next Steps
- If you think the iad4researchers blog would be a useful resource, please do make sure you subscribe to be notified on any new blog post.
- If you have a blog that you think we’d be interested in knowing about, do let us know! We would love to keep up with other similar blogs
- If there is something you would like to know more about and/or have any feedback about possible blogs do let us know! Email researchers@ed.ac.uk
- If you would like to do a guest blog, just email researchers@ed.ac.uk to discuss further
