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Practical and logistical considerations for running a cohort
You’ve decided that you want to run a Prosper cohort at your institution, so here we focus on the detailed ‘how’ of running a cohort. We provide some prompts and recommendations to aid you in planning the practicalities of how you’ll manage the delivery of your cohort. No way of running a cohort is judged to be better than another.
You don’t have to run a cohort to deliver Prosper and you can to choose your mode of participation/delivery
You may find it helpful to check out information on recruiting a cohort and onboarding a cohort before reading on.
Practicalities of running a cohort
Resources
What time, money and staff are you dedicating to running your cohort? The resource you have available will have an impact on all the aspects of running your cohort as it’ll determine the number of sessions you offer, as an example.
Scheduling cohort sessions and interactivity
You need to decide how many sessions you’ll offer your cohort. To decide this, you’ll need to be clear on your dependencies (people time or money) and identify any overlaps with your existing career development offering.
Once you’ve fixed on the number of sessions, consider which Prosper sessions you’ll offer. Are there specific topics or themes you’d like to focus on? What mix of development and community building sessions will you offer? You may wish to see how we ran a cohort .
How will Prosper fit into your existing offer? Will you fix all your sessions in advance or have some flexibility? Having flexibility gives you the option to rapidly respond to cohort feedback or requests. However, the drawback with being flexible and scheduling sessions at short notice is that it may negatively impact on the audience's ability to attend. Will you hold sessions at fixed time or day of the week or not?
How will you avoid timetable clashes around other events at both your institution and nationally (such as the biannual National Postdoc Appreciation Week (NPAW) conference)? If you’re offering career coaching to the cohort, how will you ensure you don’t have session clashes?
How will you share this calendar of sessions with your cohort? Will you open up sessions beyond the cohort to your broader community of researchers? If so, how will you share this calendar of sessions?
Cohort space (virtual and/or physical)
Will your cohort be in person/virtual/hybrid? Or a mix? Consider what practical (and financial) impact your choice will have. Will you offer anything to cohort participants unable to attend sessions live?
Will you need to share documents/resources/files with your cohort? Consider what virtual platform may best suit your needs. Does your institution already have a platform, such as MS SharePoint, that you can use? Using such a platform may have additional beneficial functionalities like a shared channel calendar and instant messaging
Communicating with your cohort and beyond
Communicating and prompting cohort engagement and reengagement
Will you regularly keep in touch with your cohort to encourage their engagement? How do you plan to do so? You may wish to send regular monthly email reminders for them to engage with the career development offering, adjusting the frequency as necessary for your cohort.
How will you encourage postdocs to reengage with the cohort and their career development if their engagement has flagged?
Communication between cohort postdocs
Building a sense of community within your cohort will aid the postdocs career development (Steen et al., 2021) and encouraging peer to peer communication can boost this. How will you encourage peer to peer interaction between cohort postdocs?
How will you facilitate cohort members to support, communicate, pool intelligence, encourage and provide accountability to each other? This could be simply by providing a space, such as MS Teams, and occasionally prompting them. See more information on starting and maintaining a cohort.
How will cohort members communicate with you?
Who is the point of contact for the cohort? What methods do you want them to communicate with you? How quickly do you want to respond to queries? Set their (and your) expectations early.
Communicating to your entire postdoc population
Will you open sessions to non-cohort postdocs and the wider community of researchers at your institution? If so, how will you let them know about this? Will you promote forthcoming cohorts to your wider postdoc community, how?
How will you encourage cohort postdocs to advocate for engaging with Prosper career development at your institution? See information on recruiting Prosper Ambassadors.
Communicating to your stakeholders
How will you keep your stakeholders informed of what’s happening with your postdoc cohort? Stakeholders may include principal investigators, managers of researchers, employer partners, senior management, alumni and so on.
Evaluation and engagement monitoring
Did you specify any expectations on attendance in the cohort participant agreement? For example, did you expect cohort members to commit to attending all, some, or a stated proportion of these sessions? How will you monitor their attendance? Will attendance below a certain level result in any action on your part? For instance, if a cohort postdoc hasn’t attended for a while would that prompt you to reach out to them to understand the reason or encourage re-engagement?
How will you collect evaluation data? Will you use an online tool such as Jisc online surveys?
How will you incorporate your evaluation feedback into improving your cohort delivery? On what timescale will you review and analyse the data to do this?
How do you plan to analyse your data and then communicate your findings? Check out our page on Evaluation for some ideas.
How and where will you securely store and process the data following your stated UK GDPR terms of use and local best practise?
How will you determine how long you need to store this evaluation data for before it must be anonymised or deleted?
Do you want to collect evaluation data from cohort members beyond the end of the cohort? How will you communicate with them to do so? How will you encourage or incentivise their engagement? If you’ve funds available, you may wish to offer a voucher for those who complete the survey.
Do you want to collect any testimonials from cohort members to use to promote forthcoming cohorts?
How we did it
Emails were used for:
- Reminding the cohort of activities on a monthly and mid-monthly basis
- Evaluating the cohort experience by issuing personalised survey links
- Keeping career coaches in the loop
- Informing PIs/Managers of researchers of ongoing activities
- Communicating with the Prosper team
Details: Monthly and mid-monthly emails sent to cohort to remind them of upcoming sessions, prompt engagement with the on-demand versions of past sessions and to circulate that month’s reflective journal prompt. These emails also highlighted other major events, outside of Prosper of interest to postdocs, such as national postdoc appreciation week. Career coaches also received these postdoc cohort emails to keep them informed.
Once a quarter cohort postdoc were emailed with a personalised link to complete an evaluation survey. See the evaluation page for more details.
PIs/Managers of researchers of cohort members were sent quarterly emails giving them a flavour of the career development sessions that had gone on during that time period.
Cohort communication with us – postdocs emailed our group email account prosper.postdoc@liverpool.ac.uk about anything related to the cohort. They also messaged us occasionally on the instant messaging platform.
Cohort-only instant messaging was used for:
- Weekly reminders
- Ad hoc messages about specific sessions
- Private career coaching group chats
- Peer to peer intelligence sharing around specific jobs
Details: We used either Microsoft Teams (pilot cohort 1, University of Liverpool only postdocs) or Slack (pilot cohort 2, postdocs from across our three partner institutions)) for instant messaging. A regular, brief reminder was sent on a Friday of sessions in the week ahead.
Ad hoc messages were sent to add extra prompts to register for particular sessions.
Individual, private, sub-channels were set up for each coaching group within the cohort so they could continue their group conversations.
A postdoc in our second pilot cohort requested a specific sub-channel to be created around ‘ethical and altruistic careers’ which a number of the postdocs joined and shared information about jobs and contacts they made in this area.
The cohort also used instant messaging to rapidly communicate to us (and each other) if they’d struggled to log in to a Zoom session or lost the session Zoom login details. This did mean on occasion we had postdocs who’d not registered for a session attend, but luckily this never pushed us over the attendee limit set by the supplier.
- University news channels
- External blogs or online articles
- Social media (Twitter)
Details: University wide news stories were disseminated via staff news channels as the pilot cohort/s began and ended. Good to raise internal institutional awareness of Prosper.
External blogs or online articles were used to raise national awareness of Prosper. Examples include our Wonkhe blog.
Twitter was used to advertise specific sessions, engage in discussions and promote others national postdoc career development focussed events, such as national postdoc appreciation week.
LinkedIn was used to keep in touch with our two pilot cohorts specifically around longitudinal evaluation. We strove to add cohort postdocs to our LinkedIn group and collect their on-going email addresses before the cohort ended.
Resources
As we had funding from Research England to develop Prosper we had resources for both people and commissioning sessions. We had between one to five research staff developers, as part of a larger project team (around 13 team members in total at its peak) based across the three partner institutions. See our page on how we ran our two pilot cohorts for details.
As we were co-creating Prosper with our two pilot postdoc cohorts we had to retain a good deal of flexibility to allow us to rapidly respond and adapt to their feedback. We aimed to timetable sessions three months in advance. We felt this struck a good balance between allowing the postdocs enough notice to juggle their commitments around sessions they wished to attend and enough agility for us to commission or plan sessions in response to their input.
Sessions were advertised on a dedicated events calendar on the prototype Prosper portal, included in the monthly and mid-monthly emails and via the weekly reminders sent on the instant messaging platform.
Session frequency – We aimed to not schedule more than one development session per week as a maximum. We aimed to not have more than three sessions in total per week. Our aim was to balance choice against overwhelming participants. We scheduled our sessions to fall within core working hours (10:00 to 16:00). All career development sessions had an on-demand version so postdocs unable to attend live were not disadvantaged.
The career coaches were responsible for timetabling their sessions with their groups/individuals. We asked the coaches to share the times/dates of their group sessions so we could avoid clashes as far as possible.
We moved sessions time, day and duration to not disadvantage any participant with regular fixed commitments. The minor drawback this had was to lose a sense of rhythm or a pattern in the minds of the participants, ‘oh it’s Thursday afternoon there must be a Prosper session’.
Table 1. Example distribution of session types across a postdoc career development cohort year. This is loosely based on the intensive two pilot cohorts Prosper ran in 2021-2023.
Table 1 shows an example of the type and number of sessions across a possible cohort year. The numbers indicate the number of that session type per month. See our page on how we ran our two pilot cohorts for more details on the different session types.
We ran 12-month long cohorts as we were co-creating Prosper with the postdocs but your cohort doesn’t need to run for this long. Below we’ve provided an example quarter, so you can see the relative proportion of each session type run over a three-month period.
Tracking cohort participation
Session registration was only required if one of the following occurred;
- Participant numbers were fixed by the supplier
- Participant numbers were needed to determine if the session was to go ahead or not
- Participant numbers were needed to plan the activity, for example the CV speedreading session.
For the small number of sessions we held in person we had a printed register. For all online sessions we recorded the attendance (or asked our supplier to provide the attendance list) from Zoom. Each team member was responsible for inputting the registration/attendance to their session into a tracking spreadsheet. The tracking spreadsheet was also used to record if participants had completed the evaluation surveys.
This tracking spreadsheet was reviewed periodically (once every three months). This allowed us to see if any cohort members had not engaged or their engagement had decreased and we could email them to see if we could help them to reengage. It could also be readily cross-referenced with the career coaches attendance spreadsheets.
Virtual space - We created a dedicated MS SharePoint site where each cohort postdoc had a dedicated private* folder to save their reflective journal entries to. It was also occasionally used to share useful documents or resources with the cohort. This was in addition to the Prosper portal and the instant messaging service used.
*It was clearly stated to the postdocs that their personal folders would be accessible by them named individual, the Prosper team and their named career coach, none else.
Physical space - For our first pilot cohort we needed no physical space as we held no face-to-face events. For the small number of in person sessions we held with our second pilot cohort we booked suitable rooms at the University of Manchester. We paid for the travel costs of any cohort members attending from the University of Liverpool or Lancaster University. As the sessions were interactive, we booked rooms that could be arranged cabaret style, had audio/visual equipment and wall space so paper-based activities could be displayed on the walls during the session. We also booked and paid for catering including hot beverages.
We’ve found room hire to be anything from free, a few hundred pounds, or up to several thousand pounds depending on size, within or external to a HEI and the facilities available (prices correct as of 2023).
Catering costs for lunch, plus hot beverages and pastries for 20 to 50 postdocs was in the region of £13 per head (price correct as of 2023).
Example cohort programs
The resources can be put together in whatever way best suits you and your audience. Here we present some example programs to get you started.
| Building your self-awareness – a focus on self-reflection |
| 1. Identity matters 2. Finding the time: Exploring what’s getting in the way of your career development 3. Introduction to self-assessment 4. How to develop self-confidence and reach your potential 5. Building your skills inventory |
| Building your awareness of employment sectors |
| 1. Skills for the future 2. Thinking like an entrepreneur 3. Commercial awareness 4. Exploring the career clusters – career exploration strategies 5. Informational interviews |
| Skills: Mapping, developing and marketing |
| 1. Building your skills inventory 2. Skills for the future 3. Career exploration strategies 4. Secrets of story telling 5. Presentation skills 6. How to stop self-sabotage and trust in yourself 7. How to write the perfect CV 8. Getting noticed by recruiters |
| Developing in my postdoc role |
| 1. Introduction to self-assessment 2. Identity matters 3. Skill spotting/identification 4. Networking (lots of options!) 5. Thinking like an entrepreneur 6. Skills for the future 7. Negotiation and influencing skills 8. Leadership 9. Intercultural competence |
| Growing and developing your research |
| 1. Creativity/how to have your next great idea 2. Skills for the future 3. Knowing when to cut your losses 4. Secrets of story telling 5. Communicating your research to non-specialists 6. University spin-outs 7. Commercial communication |
| Your own program! |
| Choose whatever resources and topics your audience want. |
You can also find a list of session guides here which you may find useful.
Recommendations
Balance the frequency and length of your communications to the cohort postdocs. If your messages are too long or information-dense they may not read or take it all in. Too infrequent and your cohort can lose a sense of momentum. Too often and the messages can become an annoyance.
Create a dedicated virtual space for the cohort only if there is clear need for one. Where possible use an existing platform the postdocs at your institution are already familiar with.
Consider delivering a mix of in-person and virtual sessions. Think about which sessions lend themselves best to the delivery format. We in-person works best for sessions which rely on a high degree of discussion, networking and community building.
Encourage peer to peer interaction and communication between cohort members as an important aspect to aid their career development.
Consider the barriers you may introduce to engagement in the way you deliver the cohort. Is there anything you could do to mitigate these? For example, is the physical space suitable for all? If participants can’t attend live is there an on-demand version?
Get your plan for evaluation in place before you start so you know;
- How you’re collecting the evaluation data
- When you’ll evaluate the cohort, including beyond the end of the cohort (if desired)
- Where it’s being stored (securely if identifiable)
- When you’re going to review and analyse it
- How you’ll implement your findings
- How you’ll share and communicate your findings
- When you’ll delete or anonymise the data
Decide if you need to monitor each cohort members participation or not. If you do wish to record this, set up your process to capture this before the cohort starts.
References
Steen, K., Vornhagen, J., Weinberg, Z. Y., Boulanger-Bertolus, J., Rao, A., Gardner, M. E. and Subramanian, S. 2021. A structured professional development curriculum for postdoctoral fellows leads to recognized knowledge growth. Plos One, 16.
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