How to run a panel session

Panel sessions, where a group of people are involved in a single discussion, can nicely complement sessions with individual speakers. Panel sessions allow contrasts and comparisons to be made on a specific theme or topic between individuals with different views and perspectives. Panel sessions can work effectively with a range of speaker types, such as former postdocs, employers, recruiters, senior members of university staff or any other stakeholders of interest to postdocs.

During the development of Prosper, several panel sessions were convened, particularly with employers, on a range of themes including (but not limited to) policy, project management and recruitment. Here, we provide some tips on how to run a panel session and give some examples from Prosper.

Why run a panel session?

A panel session can be an effective way to engage a postdoc audience in career development. Hearing insights from experts on a panel can help postdocs in their own decision-making process.

Some of the advantages of running a panel session are:

Showcasing different viewpoints by bringing together individuals with a range of perspectives on the topic being discussed. These discussions can provide the audience with a broader understanding of the area or topic.
Panel members can engage with each other as well as the audience. This provides an extra dimension because they can question and expand on each other’s points.
Panel sessions can readily fit into larger institutional events (such as postdoc conferences) because they can attract more people. The breadth of speakers is often mirrored in the audience attracted to attend.
Maximises the number of speakers and insights you can feature if you’ve only got capacity to run a small number of events for your postdocs.

As well as these advantages, there can be some challenges to running panel sessions.

Fixing a time, date and location can take a little more organisation than for events with only one speaker. The more speakers you invite to be part of your panel, the more competing diaries you have to accommodate!
If you run the panel session in-person you may need to consider the geographical locations of the speakers you invite. You may need to factor in travel and accommodation costs alongside the usual considerations (room booking, accessibility, refreshments, directions and so on).
Getting to hear from all panellist equally can require careful facilitation of the session. We suggest a maximum of five people on a panel for a one-hour session.
The question and answer part of the session needs similarly attentive facilitation to ensure a range of audience questions are heard. It’s also important to vary the order in which the panel members answer.

Themes for panel sessions

You have the option to run panel sessions around a broad theme, with a panel selected to be able to give a diverse range of insights. For example, if all of your panel members are former postdocs, asking them about their professional journey may illicit some similarities and differences.

Alternatively, you could have a narrower focus around a specific topic. This could range from things like focusing on a particular employment sector, a specific skill or the mechanics of getting a job (understanding how employers recruit).

Inviting panel members

Identifying and inviting people to participate in a panel session requires a fair amount of organisation and preparation. Once you have chosen a theme or topic, you need to reach out to potential candidates to sit on the panel. You can target specific people using your own contacts, contacts that your institution has and even contacts of postdocs who are keen to run these types of events. If your postdoc audience is quite diverse in terms of discipline, it helps if you have panel members that reflect this.

We recommend a panel with a maximum of four or five members. Any more than this and it can become difficult to facilitate and make sure everyone has sufficient time to speak. For four or five panel members, a one-hour session should be sufficient, but one and a half hours allows more depth, time for discussion and questions from the audience.

Send an initial email (see example email communications templates) to potential panel members at least two months in advance. If the person is not familiar with who you are, your organisation or the particular activity, then provide them with a brief background. Detail what the panel session will be about and why you are interested in having them speak at it. Inform them that it will be with postdocs at your institution in the month of your choosing and whether it will be in-person or online. Provide them with a few dates and times to select from.

For those who’ve declined your invite send an email (see example email communication templates) to thank them for considering it. Ask if they are interested in being invited to similar events or other opportunities in future.

Panellist practicalities – ahead of the event

Once your panellists have accepted, send an email (see example email communications templates) confirming the date and appending a calendar invite. If it will be in-person, include information about location, directions, access, reimbursing travel expenses and anything else specific to your institution. If it’s a virtual session, provide details of the online platform and login information.

Provide some more details of the structure of the panel session, how it will be facilitated and perhaps some points for the panellists to consider in advance. Ask the panellists to arrive ten minutes early to be briefed on the plans for the session.

Ask the panel members for a short biography about who they are, their professional experience and current organisation. Alternatively, you can draft a biography and ask each panellist to approve or amend it, for advertising the session. If you plan to record the session for on-demand access at your institution, tell the panellist how you’ll use it and for their expressed permission via an institutional GDPR form.

Send a reminder email (see example email communication templates) to the confirmed panel members one or two weeks in advance of the session. Re-iterate the key information, say that you’re looking forward to welcoming them and to let you know if they can no longer make the date.

Venue practicalities

If you’ve chosen to run the panel session in-person, you need to make sure a room is booked and, if necessary, any refreshments ordered. Book the room for half an hour either side of the session for any unforeseen circumstances. Depending on the size of the room and audience, you might need to provide microphones and any audio-visual equipment (if required for display or recording). Name tags might be useful if there are any follow-up networking opportunities.

Virtual session practicalities

If you are delivering your panel session using an online platform, consider the settings of the meeting carefully. You might want to mute all participants automatically upon entry and ask them to unmute to make contributions. If you use Zoom you may even wish to consider using a webinar format, if this available to you (the audience have no option to unmute or share their video but it has a nice Q&A function that allows questions to be up-voted by participants).

If you would like more audience participation, you might want to make a poll or two around the topic of interest. Or you might even want to set breakout rooms in advance if you would like to incorporate more discussion between members of the audience.

If you wish to record the session, you may want to say the following at the start of the event:

‘This session will be recorded so that postdocs that are unable to join can access it on-demand. If you do not wish to appear on camera or your voice heard in the recording, please switch off your camera and stay on mute. You can still comment, and ask questions in the chat. For the recording, could everyone keep themselves on mute unless asked to unmute to ask a question’.

Advertising the panel session to postdocs

Aim to advertise the panel session as soon as you’ve had your panellist confirm their attendance. Ideally, start advertising the session to your postdocs at least one month before the panel session. You can advertise to postdocs at your institution using internal communications, flyers and direct emails. Include the key information about date/time/location/format but also include the biographies of each of the panel members.

If you wish, or need, to keep track of attendees (for example if you’re running it in person and have a fixed audience size), ask them to register for the event. You can use on online tool such as Eventbrite. You might need to send a few event reminders up to the date of the session.

Structure and timetable of a panel session

We’d suggest a session duration of 60 to 90 minutes.

Building in time for audience questions works well, you can either do this at a couple of points throughout the session or just as the end of session (ensuring you’ve left sufficient time for this).

For a 60-minute long panel session we’d suggest a schedule something like:

10 mins before the session starts (no audience present yet) – brief the panellist and answer any queries
Welcome to session, housekeeping. 5 min.
Panellists introduction including verbal biography on theme of session. 5 to 7 mins per panellist.
Q & A. 30 mins.
Summary, thank panellist and audience, close. 5 mins.

Here we’ve provided the running order for a former postdoc panel session we ran as part of Making an Impact (an annual event held at The University of Liverpool). You can see the recording of the event here.

Former postdoc panel session - Where can your postdoc take you? A careers panel session (Tues 8^th June 11:30-12.30) running notes

(1) Facilitator (name) thank everyone for coming, give quick one-pager intro on Prosper? Something along the lines ‘Thanks for coming to this Prosper panel session. For those of you who don’t know Prosper is….’

(2) Explain how the session is going to work ‘Each of our 3 panel members will talk briefly (5-7 mins each) about their career, touching on the move from postdoc to a career beyond academia and then we will open for questions (~30 mins). Feel free to pop your questions into the chat and we’ll work through them (or as many of them as we can) once all the panel has spoken. If you’d rather ask your question verbally (rather than typed) please raise your hand in Zoom in the participants window and the chair will come to you when it’s your turn.’

Bios for each panel member -

Dr Chris Humphrey started out as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow doing Medieval Studies at the University of York, and now works as a Project Office Team Leader at Triodos Bank UK Ltd. Alongside this he founded Jobs on Toast http://jobsontoast.com/ in 2012.

Dr Georgina Key’s research background began in ecology and a PhD focussed on integrated pest management, switching focus to study soil fertility for her postdoc. Dr Key now works as a research manager at the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) developing programs of research to benefit farmers and growers.

Dr Meera Vijayaraghavan’s has a background in the physical sciences with a degree in chemistry and a PhD in advanced drug delivery from the University of Nottingham. She then moved onto a postdoc for the University of Liverpool on a joint project with BP to explore enhanced oil recovery. Meera now works as a Senior Innovation Associate at National Innovation Centre Ageing (NICA) and works with academic researchers, businesses, and citizens to innovate products and services to help us live better for longer.

(3) Use bio to introduce first panel member – then start them off with something like ‘ [NAME], please tell us how you got from postdoc to where you are now?’

(4) Questions to have in reserve in case the audience don’t initially ask any.

o Did you worry that a job anywhere other than academia would be boring?
o Is your role now 9 to 5?
o Is there anything you miss about being a postdoc/working in academia?
o How do you approach job hunting? Do you look by job title? Or do you wait until someone in your network recommends a role? Or something else entirely?
o Given Covid, how was it having an interview process that was totally virtual from start to finish?
o Which transferrable skills from your postdoc would you say you use the most now?
o Where do you picture yourself in the future? What are your current career aspirations?
o What does your ideal work role have to have?
o How much scope for creativity have you got in your current role?
o If you could tell your former self one thing about career development or job hunting or similar what would it be?
o We have an audience of postdocs from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, what advice would you give them about their career path/pursing a particular career path?
o I think it’s fair to say few of us have career paths which are linear, could you talk us through some of the forks in the road or turning points in your own career pathways?

As a rule of thumb for a 90-minute-long panel session we’d suggest the schedule to run something like:

10 mins before the session starts (no audience present yet) – brief the panellist and answer any queries
Welcome and Introductions. 10 mins. (Panellist introductions max. 2 mins per panel member).
Poll question 1 to audience (max. 5 mins), Ask panel four questions on topic 1 (max. 5 mins per question), take any audience questions. 25 mins.
Poll question 2 to audience (max. 5 mins), Ask panel four questions on topic 2 (max. 5 mins per question), take any audience questions. 25 mins.
Break – 5 mins.
Poll question 3 to audience (max. 5 mins), Ask panel three questions on topic 3 (max. 5 mins per question), take any audience questions. 20 mins.
Summary, thank panellist and audience, close. 5 mins.

This was a virtual session for one and a half hours. Some modifications for an in-person session are noted. You can use this as a template for running your own session. As you can see, we grouped the questioning into different themes and the questions were mainly asked by the facilitator but with time for audience questions too. You can watch the recording of the session here.

Prosper Employer Panel: Recruitment – Session Overview and panel member briefing

Thursday 3^rd November

15:00 – 16:30

Zoom link: [insert Zoom link]

Panel: [Insert names and organisations of panel members]

Session Outcomes:

By the end of the session, participants will:

• Understand some of the differences in recruitment processes beyond academia
• Have an improved understanding on what to expect from the application process beyond academia
• Be armed with some useful tips and advice on how to prepare for and deliver a successful job application

Agenda:

Pre-session (14:50): brief the panelist on how the session will run and any housekeeping. Take them through the plan and ask them to keep themselves on mute until they are asked a question by the facilitator. If in-person, consider having a single microphone that is passed between panel members rather than a microphone for each member. This can help ensure that only one member speaks at a time if you wish to control this.

15:00 – 15:10: Welcome and Introductions

Facilitator welcomes attendees and goes through any housekeeping (e.g. recording the session).

Facilitator lets audience know that they will have opportunities to ask questions during the session but to please remain on mute until asked to unmute. Facilitator tells audience members that they can post questions in the chat at any time and we will try to come to them. If a question is directed at a particular panel member, please make this clear. If in-person, make clear that there will be parts of the session dedicated to audience questions.

Facilitator then invites panel members to introduce themselves – please share your role and a brief (2-minute max) overview of your experience/interest in recruitment and recruiting talent to your organisation.

15:10 – 15:35: Pre-interview stages

Facilitator introduces the topic of the pre-interview phase of recruitment. Including CVs, Cover Letters, Application Forms, Psychometric testing and interacting with recruiters.

Launch poll question – Are you confident in your understanding of what employers are looking for from a job application in order to be invited to interview? Y/N

If in-person, can just do a show of hands.

Facilitator asks questions (go to each panel member in turn – pass microphone if in-person):

• What recruitment tools do you use in order to determine whether to invite a candidate to interview?

• What makes a CV/Cover Letter/Application form stand out?

• What are the common pitfalls you see? What makes you immediately rule out a candidate?

• What high-level advice would you give to ace the pre-interview stage?

Facilitator then takes any questions from the chat and asks people to raise their hand if they have any additional questions.

15:35 – 16:00: Interview stage

Facilitator introduces the topic of the interview phase of recruitment. Including preparing for interviews and different types of interview (in-person, video, assessment centres).

Launch poll question – What do you think is most important to do in preparation for an interview? (Multiple choice answers: Research the company and role, Have a few questions to ask recruiter, prepare an answer bank, conduct mock interviews, practice your speaking voice and body language). No wrong answer here but will be good to see which they think is most important.

If in-person, can display questions and answers on a screen and go through each answer asking audience to raise hands.

Facilitator asks questions (go to each panel member in turn – pass microphone if in-person):

• How do you interview in your organisation?

• What are your tips for best preparing for an interview?

• How can candidates ensure they have a successful interview?

• What are the common pitfalls you see?

Facilitator takes questions from audience and any in the chat window.

16:00 – 16:05: Short break

16:05 – 16:25: Post-interview stages

Facilitator introduces topic of post-interview phase of recruitment. Including the negotiations that may spring up as part of the process and the first few weeks in a new job.

Launch poll question – Would you feel comfortable negotiating a higher salary? Y/N

If in-person, just ask for a show of hands.

Facilitator asks questions (go to each panel member in turn – pass microphone if in-person):

• How do you feel about a candidate negotiating a higher salary/flexible working and so on? What is your experience of this?

• What are the things most people try to negotiate or should be trying to negotiate? Do you have any tips on how best to do this?

• What are your top tips for a candidate’s first week in a new job? What things can they do to settle in quickly?

Facilitator takes questions from the audience and chat window.

16:25 – 16:30: Summary, thanks and close

Facilitating the session

We suggest having two facilitators in the session (whether online or in-person) to assist with triaging the audience’s questions.

If your session is online your second facilitator can help group questions with a similar theme together and read them out (if being submitted via a written format) or highlight the order in which audience members are waiting to ask their questions verbally/order in which they raised their hands. They can also handle any technical difficulties, admit people from the waiting room or control moving people into breakouts (if you’re using these).

If in-person the second facilitator can be the ‘roving microphone’ ensuring everyone in the audience, as well as the panel, clearly hear the question.

As the chair (or first facilitator) once the question has been asked you can direct the order in which the panel members respond. If the question is addressed to a single member of the panel once they’ve answered, if you deem it appropriate you can invite the other panellist to add their thoughts.

The second facilitator can also ask the first question to the panel. This can be helpful if the audience are hesitant/slow/shy in putting forth their questions.

Both facilitators can be time keepers and be mindful of when there is only time for the final question. If doing this online the second facilitator can pick a short or short to answer question to ensure the session end on time.

After the session

In the few days following the panel session, send a thank you email (see example communication templates) to the panellists to say how valuable their contribution is to postdocs. Say that you will keep them informed of any future speaking opportunities at your institution if they are interested.

You may also wish send a feedback form to registered attendees to get their views on the session and perhaps any topic, speaker or theme they’d like to see in the future.

Recommendations

Aim for a panel of around four to five speakers for a 60-minute session.
Contact possible panellists at least two months before you wish to hold the session.
Send a reminder email to the confirmed panel members one or two weeks in advance of the session.
Ask the panellists to arrive ten minutes early to be briefed on the plans for the session.
Ask the panel members to provide a short biography about who they are, their professional experience and current organisation that you can use in advertising the session to your postdocs.
Aim to advertise the session at least one month before it’s due to run (or when you’ve had your panellists confirm, whichever gives the longest time ahead of the session).
Facilitate the session clearly and carefully, ensuring all panellist get a fair chance to talk and the audience’s questions get covered.

Virtual panel sessions are typically easier to organise when inviting multiple external panellists (as their time commitment is much smaller), however you may lose some of the atmosphere of an in-person event.
Expect one of the panel members to drop-out. Panels work fine with three to four panellists. If you want to be prepared have a close-colleague (who understands this type of situation) as a standby panellist who can add useful insights into the discussion.
Brief the panellists well in advance what the topic, structure of the session and what you expect from them is. You can also pre-warn them of how the session will be facilitated.
We suggest these sessions have a Q&A as an integral part of the session.
We recommend having two facilitators in the session (whether online or in-person) to assist with triaging the audience’s questions.

Example email communication templates

The following emails were sent to stakeholders (mainly employers) before and after running a panel session. They are provided as examples that you can use and adapt to fit you.

Download all example emails