Hi, I’m Dr Fiona McBride. I’m going to be taking you through several approaches to aid a postdoc to create a skills inventory. I’ll be covering what a skills inventory is, why it’s important, how you can signpost your postdocs to some practical ways to unpack their skills, and we’ll provide some prompt questions for you to consider. Before we get into the practical approaches to help your postdoc unpack their skills, we first want to address why unpacking a researcher’s skills is important.

So, postdocs need to consider all of their career options. As the graph in the slide shows, the growth in the number of PhDs awarded and thus the prospective pool of postdocs has outstripped the number of permanent academic positions available. It’s also worth noting that not all postdocs aspire to become academics. We found references stating anything from a high of around 70 per cent down to 52 per cent of postdocs desiring to pursue a career in academia. This academic career aspiration persists despite the chances of landing a permanent position becoming ever slimmer. It’s estimated that only about 15 per cent of postdocs go on to tenure-track faculty positions.

However, this percentage differs with research field. Another way of looking at it is that in the UK less than 0.5 per cent of those who have a PhD in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine will become a professor. Despite the low proportion of postdocs going on to a permanent academic career, there’s a reluctance to consider other so-called alternative careers beyond academia.

Moving beyond academia is often seen as a failure. Postdoc researchers develop advanced skills that are valuable beyond the traditional academic research career. It’s important that they’re fully aware of this diverse set of long-term career opportunities open to them, and that they’re supported to consider other options. All of this means that postdocs need to be very savvy about their skills, being able to identify them, build, develop, and articulate them appropriately to whatever audience they’re talking to. Being clear on their skills will be useful to them wherever their career takes them, including whilst they’re in their current role with you.

In order to get clarity on their skills, we suggest that postdocs are encouraged to create a skills inventory, a working document which contains all of their educational qualifications and professional skills. You’re well-placed to help, as postdocs can tend towards undervaluing some of their skills, especially their broader set of transferable skills, like being able to work with others and having some general management skills, such as project management. So how do we go about doing this?

Well, we’ve proposed three possible practical approaches to help postdocs unpack all of the skills that they have as researchers. Time is the first route we propose. So, postdocs can consider how they spend their time, what tasks make up their work, and they could even use their calendars to aid them with this. You may have seen these pie charts before on social media comparing the tasks a postdoc does compared to an assistant professor. They break the postdoc time down into five main tasks and the assistant professors into 26 tasks. From their point of view, a postdoc spends the vast majority of their time working on their research, with a relatively small amount of time spent on things like reading, writing, and reviewing the literature, and professional development.

I can only comment from my own experience, but I think most postdocs work on more tasks than the five they’ve presented here. So, the largest slice on the postdoc pie chart was research working on your project; your postdoc can break this down further as research is really an umbrella term and what it covers differs widely depending on the exact research project, never mind discipline. Once they’ve identified the main tasks they do, we suggest breaking them down into their component parts to uncover all of the skills. In the worked example on screen, we’ve selected three very broad main tasks, research, teaching, and training or supervision. We’ve then gone on to break these into subtasks and beyond that, all the way down to the skills.

So once your postdoc has created a list like this, you could prompt them to reflect on it, posing questions such as, ‘What tasks and skills are you good at? Which do you like using? Which would you like to continue using? Which ones not so much? Which would you like to develop?’ If they wish to discuss it with you, it may be beneficial to explore their perceptions of their skills and which ones they think they’re good at versus your more impartial view. We know that it’s easy to overlook and underappreciate skills you use all of the time and that you may see all of those around you displaying and thus think your skillsets not noteworthy.

We’d encourage you, as PIs, to highlight any skills you see your postdocs use that they may be overlooking or perhaps undervaluing. Some postdocs find getting past the first step and breaking down the tasks tricky. So, we’ll now cover what skills should researchers be looking for, and how does this compare with what employers want? So, the Vitae Researcher Development Framework details a great number of skills in different areas researchers may have or could work on.

Eurodoc particularly focuses on transferable skills. We held three workshops with employers, and we directly asked them, ‘Which qualities are most important for you in an employee?’ These are the answers we got. As we go through these three-word clouds, you’ll notice how frequently things like willingness to learn, collaboration, team-working, communication, and creativity appear. Our findings match pretty well with the skills highlighted by the World Economic Forum as important for the future of jobs. In addition, we asked employers, ‘What makes an application stand out to you?’ The answer is just one example of what many employers have told us, that a long list of academic publications just doesn’t help them understand anything about the breadth and range of skills a postdoc has. This brings us to our second approach to identify skills by getting postdocs to consider one of their specific research outputs and using that as a focus to unpack all of the skills they used to achieve this output. We suggest encouraging the postdoc to think broadly about the skills needed for this particular research output. Do they have to collaborate with others? Do they have to negotiate? Do they have to manage the research budget for part of this project? Did they craft a compelling narrative with data, and many more things besides?

The final approach we’ve proposed, we’ve called real-time skill-spotting. This is where postdocs can populate a grid with the skills they want to see if they actually use or not. The grid we’ve created is just one-week long, but they can tailor it to any timeframe that works for them. In the worked example, we’ve selected some skills from Eurodoc’s lists of transferable skills under the cognitive heading. The postdoc would then simply mark the grid when they notice that they’ve used that skill, ideally along with a small note to aid their memory for when they come to put it into their skills inventory. The end of the week, we suggest that they pause to reflect on the findings in their grid, then set themselves an action based on their reflections.

For example, if there was a skill they’d like to have used but didn’t, could they identify a way to bring it in using it next week? If your postdoc discusses it with you, perhaps you could highlight skills you see them use that they’ve overlooked. Alternatively, if they highlight a specific skill area they wish to develop in, think if you could help by signposting or perhaps even delegating a task to them, giving them opportunities to develop their leadership skills, for example. You may find that this is mutually beneficial, helping your workload, whilst they grow and develop their skills.

If the postdoc is still stuck and struggling to identify their transferable skills, you can signpost them to the former postdoc case studies on the Prosper website for inspiration. Here, we’re just presenting some questions for you to ponder and have a think about, perhaps even to discuss with your colleagues or with your own mentor. Thank you for your time.

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