Dan Allwood and I agree about most things when it comes to clear communication and writing a competitive grant proposal. Dan likes to joke that we speak with one voice, like the Borg.
However, there is one thing that we don’t exactly see eye to eye on.
The term “early career researcher”. Who exactly does it encompass?
My perspective was developed from inside EPSRC, where we typically used it to mean those who were in their first academic post, or at the early stages of being in a permanent academic position. PhD students and post-docs were referred to by title.
For Dan, however, they are all considered ECRs: they are researchers early in their career.
There are two reasons I’m bringing up this piece of semantics.
First, it illustrates why it’s important to define terms that could be used in different ways by different research areas or disciplines. Ensuring that everyone is on the same page avoids misinterpretations and misunderstandings.
Second, although we may have different names for them, Dan and I are in agreement that PhD students, post-docs, and early career academics tend to face the same problem.
It is assumed that because they are clever people, they can pick up all the non-technical skills they need to know via the process of osmosis.
PhD students read published papers, therefore they should know how to write a paper that is worthy of publication.
Post-docs work on funded projects, therefore they should know how to generate and evaluate their own novel research ideas.
Early career academics work in departments (or schools or faculties) surrounded by people who have received research funding, therefore they should know how to assemble a research project from scratch.
Of course, this isn’t how real people actually learn.
But the effect is that many ECRs—whether a PhD, post-doc, or academic—end up wasting time and energy trying to muddle through.
Added to this, many researchers have perfectionistic tendencies, fear of failure, and are hesitant about asking for help (after all, shouldn’t they know all of this already?).
The result of this approach is that ECRs are never sure they are doing things the right way. The cumulative effect is often stress and loss of confidence in their abilities. Is it any wonder that Imposter Syndrome is so prevalent in academia?
I suspect this toxic mixture is also the cause of academic procrastination, but that’s a blog post for a different day.
What it comes down to is that training in non-technical skills must be valued as much the technical. They are not optional. They are not “nice to have”. They are going to be what differentiates one very clever researcher from another. One will make sure their work has impact and that their brilliant ideas are understandable to different audiences.
And the other? Well, they’ll probably be assimilated with everyone else who just focuses on technical skills.
Drop me a line to learn more about how Dan and I can help researchers at all levels of their careers.