This session is about careers beyond academia and my name is Katie, I’m the Stakeholder Engagement Manager on Prosper. So the outcomes for today really are threefold. Firstly, to give you a greater understanding of the employment context for your postdocs, and that’s twofold really. It’s partly to give you a bit of a snapshot of some of the challenges faced by the postdoc community. I’m sure many of you are well aware of those already, but there may be some statistics that are of interest.

But second, it’s not just about the challenges. We also want to outline the great range of opportunities that are available out there for your postdocs so that you can be aware of those and perhaps pass on that information or signpost your postdocs effectively. Secondly, we want you to leave today with some real concrete ideas on how you can support your postdocs career development and importantly, the benefits to you as well of doing that. As Andrews says, you know, we have a focus today and in Prosper generally, I think the bulk of our focus is on beyond academia, but that doesn’t at all mean that we preclude, or we don’t want to support academic career development either. So, hopefully you’ll find something of use there.

Thirdly, and most importantly really, we want the session today to give you the opportunity to learn from your fellow PIs about what has worked well for them, what perhaps hasn’t worked so well, and to perhaps stimulate some discussion and some sharing of best practice and also of emerging practice of developing practice around postdoc support. So there they’re the outcomes, and I think what we wanted to start with was this quote, which I’m not sure if many of you have seen it, but it’s a really powerful quote from the Wellcome 2020 report into research culture and when I read this it really chimed with me and chimed with the pressures that I was aware that my previous PI was under.

So I think it is just worth just taking a moment to read this out. ‘Everyone in their job has to multi-task…’ Oops, sorry. ‘Everyone in the job has to multi-task but this is a bit different. This is a bit absurd… You need to be a teacher, you need to be a scientist, you need to be an accountant, you need to be a politician, you need to be a very skilled writer, an excellent communicator and all of those different things take up a bit of time… That makes doing research tricky, because to really do the very best research, you need clear blocks of time. Having 40 minutes free, or an hour, just doesn’t cut the mustard and I haven’t even mentioned management.

As a university professor, you have to be a manager of people and projects.’ So I think the reason for sharing that is [laughs] to emphasise to you that we do, I think we do as a team, we don’t just want to be engaging with PIs saying, ‘You must do this for your postdoc.’ We really understand the pressures and we really, you know, we really try to maintain an awareness of the pressures that PIs are under, and what we want to try and demonstrate with Prosper is that although it may feel like it sometimes, it’s not necessarily a zero sum game, spending time and investing time in developing your postdocs.

Because, as we know, and as I’m sure you’re aware, and as we’ve learnt from the extensive engagement we’ve done with postdocs as part of the project, motivated postdocs that feel valued are much more likely to be more productive, more proactive in their career development, and more able and willing, potentially, to take responsibilities from you to the benefit of both of you. So, you know, perhaps they couldn’t fulfil all of those roles described in the previous quote but certainly things like teaching responsibilities, additional administrative, writing responsibilities.

These are all kind of additional skills that could really benefit postdocs and that may help you deal with all of those competing demands on your time as PIs. Okay, so in order to help you, help postdocs, we’ve kind of come at this session with the three As.

So the first is awareness, so I guess I think that if you are aware of the challenges as well as the opportunities that your postdocs face. If you come at it with that kind of knowledge when you come to have discussions with your postdocs or to kind of convey certain attitudes or approaches to your postdocs, them knowing that you have an awareness of their situation is going to be really helpful.

Secondly, the nature of your particular approach, and I suppose attitude to postdoc career development is really important. So again, what we’ve heard from PIs as well as postdocs is that it’s really important that you’re open to having career conversations in the first place, and when you have those conversations do not necessarily privilege the academic pathway to keep things open. That doesn’t mean, of course, that you have to be anywhere near an expert at anything other than your particular area of expertise, be that academia or academia with a few other areas. It’s simply that I think a lot of postdocs have internalised through a variety of means a sense that anything other than academia is failure, and I think it’s really important that we stop contributing to the reinforcement of that message.

Finally, following your awareness and approach is action, what actions can you take to support your postdocs. So, we’ve got some suggestions here around signposting, networking and Andrew’s also going to talk through some practical exercises. But I think possibly the most useful part of that will come from talking to your fellow PIs as well, which is why we’ve reserved a big chunk of the session for that.

So, firstly if we move to Awareness, then. Just a bit of a kind of an overview of the postdoc population which may be of interest. So, there are between 50,000 and 80,000 postdocs in the UK, depending on which source you look at, and just for context there are around 80,000 to a 100,000 in the US, in the whole of the US. So it’s a really sizeable population for the UK. There’s a higher proportion of that number within STEM, but there are a significant and growing number in Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences.

As we all know, demand for academic careers is high and supply in no way meets this demand. So that’s just a fact, it’s not a matter of the level of dedication or talent of any postdocs who aspire to work in academia. But what we do know is that postdocs are a really highly skilled group of people, creative, intelligent, highly trained, dedicated often, and yet because of this simple fact in many cases their long-term career prospects, or their perception of their long-term career prospects I should say, don’t necessarily reflect just how talented they are. This chart just gives you a little bit of a breakdown of postdocs by discipline.

So why is this? I think you’re probably aware that there are two main reasons for this. The first is structural and that’s not necessarily something that we can change in any large way with Prosper, but you know, increasing number of PhDs at the same time as a decreasing number of academic positions, the way research is funded etc. This is not really something that we’re seeking to influence in any major way. But what we are seeking to change is the cultural aspect of this, so where we really think we can make a difference and we can support PIs to make differences around this kind of supporting postdocs to broaden their aspirations and to being opening.

I’ve just pulled out a quote from one of the members of our first cohort, which I’m not going to read out, but essentially what he says is, you know, he felt very down about the structural state of academia before Prosper. This hasn’t change and yet his attitude has really changed, and he feels a lot more confident now. So this is the change we’re trying to bring about.

Just to give you a kind of impression of the potential that postdocs have. You know, as a part of the project we’ve collected lots of different case studies from postdocs from a variety of disciplines that would broadly align to the three faculties at University of Liverpool and other institutions. So, for example, we’ve got Dr. Edward Latter, former chemist, he’s now policy lead at Defra. We’ve got Dotun, former environmental scientist turned, he works in finance for start-ups in Sub-Saharan Africa, or Kate who is a former neuroscientist turned founder of a scientific communications company.

So what we’re trying to do with Prosper is broaden postdocs awareness, not only beyond academia but also of the idea that there are many routes and a variety of things that they can do beyond academia that aren’t necessarily linked to their area of research specialism. Sometimes they are, and that’s great but there’s a much broader array of opportunities than we may initially think. And one of the pieces of research, there isn’t much out there, but one of the pieces of research that you might be familiar with on this, and on what postdocs do next. Can you see the videos on the bottom of my screen? I can just see the screen, the PowerPoint.

Just the PowerPoint.

Oh good, sorry. I just, I can see a variety of things, I just wanted to check that you couldn’t. Okay, good. So, yes, so Vitae did a report in 2016, so a while back now, following up what research staff do after pursuing roles outside of academia and you can see here that there’s a real range of things.

A big chunk are working in higher education, life sciences and pharmaceuticals, and public administration are also big areas. But it’s a lot broader than that and I’ve put the methodology of this report at the bottom just in small print because I think it’s important to note that I don’t think that we can say this methodology is in any way leads to figures that are representative, actually. I don’t think it’s any surprise that over a quarter are working in HE, when Vitae’s mainly engaging with HE stakeholders.

But it’s just to give you an impression that there are a variety of things that postdocs can do. One of the ways that we’ve tried to express that within Prosper is via the co-creation of this set of 12 career clusters. So what we did with this is we held a series of workshops and group and one-to-one sessions with a hundred employers, up to hundred from a range of different sectors, and what we tried to unpick was 1) where are the main challenges or areas of growth and need in our economy and 2) where do we think postdocs can add most value and overlap those two things and came up with this 12 set of career clusters which is one of the ways that we are curating and arranging the content for Prosper.

So all I wanted to do with this really is to draw out that there are so many things that your postdocs may go on to do or may be interested in pursuing. So just to refer to a couple of them if we look at start-ups and entrepreneurships. Kate, the postdoc who I mentioned earlier has set up her own business. There are many postdocs who might pursue spin-outs from their research but not only that there are many former postdocs who we’ve commissioned as consultants in content delivery professionals, as part of Prosper. So there are a variety of things that postdocs can do and there will be lots of resources on the Prosper portal around setting up your own business.

To give another example, life sciences and pharma. I think anybody who’s worked in life sciences will be aware of the pharmaceutical industry as a potential employer of postdocs, but not everybody is aware that there is so many opportunities beyond R&D in medical affairs and things like that. Pharm is a huge employer consisting of both those big multi-nationals that we all know as well as lots and lots of smaller SMEs and start-ups, especially in the North West region.

So there’s so many opportunities for postdocs there, and interestingly not just postdocs in typical STEM subjects, there are lots of business, communications, typical professional opportunities there as well. Just to pick up on perhaps a less scientific one, creative and cultural industries is a really important area and a real interesting area of opportunity for postdocs.

One of our key members of the stakeholder engagement panel, Al Mathers, she is a former social sciences postdoc who’s gone on to be the director of research for the RSA. so works a lot in policy and public engagement and engaging with lots of different creative and cultural organisations as part of that. So, I guess if  you’re sort of aware that there are so many of these exciting opportunities you can pass that enthusiasm on to your postdocs, or that’s what we’re hoping, and ultimately when these career clusters are available on the portal this will be accessible to both postdocs and PIs so you can dig into that little bit and perhaps learn more about the areas that may be more of interest to you and your team.

I guess just finally, Andrew and I were talking about this, what we really want to do as well with the career clusters is demystify this term ‘industry’. Now it’s not necessarily a term that’s used by all academics. I’m sure Alex doesn’t necessarily use in Jewish studies; I think it’s more of a STEM thing. But I think we’ve picked up on this term because it tends to mean, and please disagree with me if you don’t agree, but it tends to mean anything that’s not academia.

What we want to do with Prosper is change the mindset from academia and everything else to situating academia within a much broader range of opportunity for people who have pursued research careers up to now. Okay so, so much for awareness and I hope that’s given you a bit of an insight into careers beyond academia for your postdocs. What I want to do, what I would like to show you is a video from PIs that we’ve engaged with as part of Prosper on how important your approach is when discussing careers beyond academia with your team.

But, given that we’re a little bit short on time, what I think I’ll do is put the link to that video in the chat and just quickly summarise that we have postdocs from a range of disciplines in that video, so Dr. Tom Hasell in Chemistry, Carsten Welsch at University of Liverpool in Physics, Ruth Nugent in Digital Humanities, all emphasising the importance of being open and respectful, which I’m sure you all will be anyway. But, also not privileging the academic pathway and not making assumptions that that’s what your postdoc wants to do, because I think many postdocs who may be considering careers beyond academia perhaps understandably don’t think that that’s something that they can discuss with their PIs. So, if you are open to that, it’s really important to make that clear to your postdocs because a huge proportion of postdocs will see you guys as their first port of call for considering their future.

So, moving on from approach, finally action. So there are a variety of things that you can do. Signposting, I guess, is the simplest and you can of course signpost your postdocs to Prosper. For those of you here who aren’t at Liverpool, Manchester, or Lancaster at the moment, Prosper will be made available as Andrew said from next summer to all institutions. It will be open access. You can also signpost, of course, to the researcher development function within your institution.

So here at Liverpool we have a research and development team, it’s a small one but a really productive one and I’m sure, I know in fact, that Manchester and Lancaster have the same. You can also signpost to organisations that you know that may be of interest. So, do you collaborate for example with public bodies or industrial bodies such pharmaceutical companies. If you have contacts there or activities there that you think would be of benefit to your postdocs, please do signpost them and that leads me on to the next point, which is networking. It’s really important that you share your network with your postdocs and perhaps you’re not aware of how broad and powerful the network is, so it may be a good action for you just to think for a moment about your immediate professional network and your extended professional network, including your partners, collaborators, even your personal network.

You know, it may be that you know somebody personally who works in an industry or an organisation that your postdoc is interested in. We’ve just got a really nice quote there from Professor Raechelle D’Sa in FSE here at Liverpool, she sits on our board. She mentions how she gives, every time she meets an industrial partner, a clinician, a patient involvement group, she takes one of her postdocs with her. So, I think it’s about really not only building your postdocs career development through that, but that also builds the capacity within your team and enables your postdocs to support you in the ways that we were talking about earlier. And for the final action point, I’m going to hand over to Andrew for this because Andrew is a former postdoc and most of these are his ideas around what he would have found useful. So I think it’s really great that we get that perspective. So I’ll pause there. Andrew?

Thanks, Katie. I should say, yes, I’m a former postdoc and I have had some of these ideas, but it’s also drawing on ideas and reflections from postdocs that we’ve spoken to throughout both our cohorts and beyond, and things we’ve spoken with PIs about as well. So, I cannot claim credit for this [laughs].

So these are three, we think, fairly straightforward approaches as PIs you could take in discussion with your postdocs, as ways of getting to look for and consider other possible careers beyond academia. So, the first one is company hunting. Asking your postdoc to find two potential employers, organisations or companies that do something that interests your postdoc. It doesn’t matter really whether it’s something that the postdoc actually wants to do or it’s just something the find really interesting. One organisation should be in the same, or similar, or related field to your subject area and then one in a different field entirely.

Or, alternatively, you can suggest they look for different organisation types. So, for instance, a multi-national compared to an NGO or something in the third sector. Once they’ve found two organisations then you should ask them to reflect on why these organisations are interesting to your postdoc. What the roles in those organisations might involve? What experiences or skills they might need? Now this is something you could just simply send your postdoc away and say, ‘Go away, find these companies, reflect on them.’ Or you could ask them to come back to you in a meeting and discuss those companies with them, asking them questions about why they find the organisations interesting, how they think they could fit within those organisations.

You could even suggest afterwards that your postdocs reach out to conduct an informational interview with somebody at that organisation to really find out a lot more about what actually goes on on a day-to-day basis. As Katie said, when Prosper does go full live and we get a lot more of these resources up on the site, we will have guides for postdocs about doing informational interviews. We’ll have guides about how to find specific companies and ways to find organisations that they might be interested in. So, in the future, in the next few months, we will have plenty of resources up there for you to point your postdocs towards.

The second suggested exercise is something rather similar but a bit broader, exploring the career clusters. We’ve got a whole bunch of them there and they will be made available on the main Prosper portal site very soon actually, and in each of those clusters there’s information about the types of organisations that work within those clusters. There are interviews with people who have been postdocs in the past and are now working in those industries. So we suggest that you suggest your postdoc investigates three of the clusters. One that they’re most interested in, one cluster that they’re not in any way interested in and one video or one cluster where they’d like to find out a bit more, they’re not too sure. We’re calling this the traffic-light approach to engaging with the clusters. If nothing else, asking them to watch the short videos in each of those three clusters and then ask them to reflect on what they find out from their investigations.

Employers from all of the clusters can give insights into careers beyond academia irrespective of whether the postdoc is interested in that specific area or not. For example, all the employers talk about the process of moving beyond academia. They talk about the sorts of transferrable skills that are in demand outside of academia and they provide examples of the types of culture that might be experienced at larger or smaller organisations. So they’re well worth a looking into.

One of the main reasons we suggest simply just giving your postdocs a bit of a steer about how to go about looking into these things, is that one thing your postdocs are all brilliant at is research, and finding out more about careers and organisations and stuff it draws entirely on the skills that they already have. So it should be something that they can actually start to enjoy because your postdocs, if they don’t enjoy research then that is a sign for them to probably move on.

The third exercise there is the postdoc tune-up, and this is more if they’ve got an idea of the type of organisation or career that they would actually like to go into after their postdoc or they have found a company that they think is really interesting and they would like to know more about. We suggest you ask them to identify five key skills or types of experience they might need for that sort of role, and then to discuss those skills with your postdoc identifying skills that they already have or skills that they might need strengthening.

Finally, considering if there are any ways that your postdocs can gain or develop those skills or experiences within their current role, either as part of their day-to-day activities or as part of their ten days career development, looking outside of their specific role on one of those days. So that’s the three exercises, I’ll now hand back to Katie to continue the session.

Brilliant, thank you for that, Andrew. Okay, I realise this is actually a lot of information to take in, isn’t it? So I do hope that some of this is proving useful and sparking some kind of thoughts.

[END OF TRANSCRIPT]

I don’t really know that I have any right to speak about my experiences, but here is what they are. I had to do – and have to do – with postdocs in three different contexts. I’m obviously in an arts subject and so the relationship between higher education and other organisations is actually a little bit different or it seems a bit different.

Generally also the throughput of PhDs or post-PhDs is actually probably going to be quite different from some of the STEM subjects. So anyway, I had two larger projects in which I had postdocs, which I had to look after as being PI of the project.

I also am research coordinator for my department, so I am mentoring a number of other projects, postdocs, not as their line manager, not as their PI, but as somebody who gives background advice or is available to them for contact. That’s something that we’ve instituted quite systematically over the last few years in our department and I think that is in itself extremely helpful. It includes postdocs who are on independent projects, like British Academy postdocs who have their own project – who are basically postdoc and PI at the same time – and PI postdocs who are attached to a project of a colleague where they are doing work under the direction of that particular PI. Different kind of postdoc research in the arts.

Finally I am organising – I have been organising since 2016 – an annual event for researchers in Jewish studies who are either at the late PhD stage or at a postdoc stage. So those are my background frameworks for having experiences with postdocs and advising postdocs.

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I do feel it’s a very important area, but I would also say that I am absolutely by no means an expert. These are just some of my thoughts that came together partly through talking to some of my postdocs and partly through reflecting on experience. Next slide, please.

So the first thing I think is to be aware and that really just involves asking because our teams are so diverse. So I’m a professor of clinical pharmacology. So I’m a consultant physician as well as the research that I do. So some of my team members are clinical and I’m showing some slides showing some of the unusual situations that we’ve come across in recent years.

The first one was responding to an Ebola outbreak in western Uganda and the one below obviously was the COVID pandemic. There was different situations, different pressures. Of course, everybody is unique. That’s what I love about diversity work is that every single person brings something to the workplace that no other person can bring and every single person has skills that can be used in combinations that no other person could do. Sometimes that’s within academia, but sometimes it’s not. For me, the very best way to be aware of what my team members are going through, whether it’s at life or work, is just to talk, just to ask.

Now, I know that there can be boundaries and there are times when it may be inappropriate to ask too many personal questions, but I try to attend to whether I try to or not. My natural style is to be quite open myself about my own life and I find that that style does tend to encourage openness amongst my colleagues. Again, in a highly pressured acute situation that might not be the right approach, but I do find it helps me understand where people are coming from. Next slide, please.

So in terms of my approach, it’s not so much my approach, it’s the approach that I try to foster. I did share these slides with a couple of my postdocs before this talk and I said, ‘If you ever find me not doing this, you need to hold me to account,’ because as we get more senior and as we get older and we face different challenges and situations in our lives, sometimes we can lose touch a little bit with what’s happening on the ground. I think we all have had the experience of having had senior colleagues that are just on a very slightly different planet and they just don’t really understand or relate either to our current situation or even the pressures of modern life.

For example, the cost of buying a house compared to 20 or 30 years ago is quite substantially different. There are different situations. I think as team leaders we need to really show our willingness to listen, to learn, to lead, but not always to lead, sometimes to let them lead, sometimes to actually say, ‘No, I’m not going to give that talk. I want my postdoc to do it, but I will come with them and give feedback.’ That quote from Rochelle [?Saar 0:03:09.3] that you just read out, Katie, that said it so beautifully.

To bring your team members with you when you go to meetings when I’m engaging with stakeholders, if I have to go to Ministry of Health or something, I feel like I’m on the learning curve. To bring a junior colleague – whether that be a postdoc or a PhD student – with me, to bring them with me to share the experience and to learn together, that does require a certain humility. It involves that transparency of them knowing that I don’t pretend for a second that I know everything and that might be uncomfortable. At times it can be uncomfortable. I think also having some fun, laugh, lighten the load, labour together.

We do quite a lot of public engagement activities with our teams. Our work sort of lends itself to that, but I do find them great team building exercises where we can really get alongside each other and understand the pressures. Often the conversations that come up, for example, over dinner are the ones that are much more rich than what might come up sitting in my office in a more formal setting. Next slide, please.

So what about action? So again, I’m sorry for the cheesy alliteration, but Katie, you did suggest structuring it according to three A’s. To me, the action involves asking, acknowledging, advocating and allyship. Maybe I’m not using that word quite correctly, but often it’s that asking and trying to understand where people are coming from and acknowledging what they’re going through. I think it’s also important to acknowledge that our postdocs are often the solid, hard workers in our team. They’ve got some very good skills and they often focus on a specific task.

So for example, at the moment, I’ve got two postdoctoral pharmacokinetic modellers out here in Uganda and that is just fantastic because there’s a lot of work to do. We have a lot of data but we don’t just want to analyse data; we want to engage more with policymakers; we want to do more teaching and training. There’s just no way I could do all of that but they’re able to really take the lead on different aspects of that. So I need to acknowledge that I could not do this without them. In terms of advocating, it’s that, what I said, sometimes saying ‘No, I’m not going to accept this speaker invitation, but I know somebody that would do it really, really well,’ or to maybe say, ‘Yes, I’ll give the talk, but can I split it with my postdoc so that we perhaps present half and half?’

Similarly trying to get those postdocs to conferences, introduce them to collaborators, take them around and you can see some pictures of us doing just that. There may be local networks. For example, we have Project Prosper in Uganda. I’ve been quite involved with the African Women in Science Hub, which is basically similar. It spans more than just postdocs, but it includes postdocs. The idea is to provide sort of mentorship and skills to empower women in their careers in science.

So when I was thinking about what I want to do, what I really want to see happen with my postdocs, the first thing is I need to employ them. What I mean by that is it is quite possible to write a multi-million-pound grant and not write any postdocs into it. I think it’s something that we should do if we’re applying for that level of funding to make sure we have some postdoc positions as well as some PhD studentships written into that.

Then I think we should be enabling and equipping them to do what they are there to do. So sometimes somebody has come from a different PhD background and maybe they feel out of their depth because they lack a particular skill. So how can we help them get what they need? As I’ve already mentioned, a lot of it is not doing it for them. It’s like releasing them to be the person or the scientist that they need to be. So empowering them, enthusing them and elevating them to get into those positions and those positions, as we’ve discussed.

I would expect my postdocs – some of them are going to end up in policy. Some are going to end up in science communications. Some are very, very gifted teachers and I could well imagine them going back into the more educational sector. There are others that have skills in coding and software development and of course, in pharmacology, industry is always there. To echo something that was said earlier on: moving into industry is not failure. It’s an alternative choice.

I was reflecting on this earlier. As a doctor, when we’re medical students, nobody admits that they want to go into GP. For some reason, GP is seen as the underdog. Yet the fact is most of us will end up in general practice and it can be a bit like that with academia and industry or careers outside academia. It’s like nobody wants to admit that they want to do something outside. They feel that it’s a failure or they feel that it’s not as good and actually it can be a real positive choice. So like our previous speaker, I try to give them permission to explore these and be willing to write supportive references.

I suppose also times are changing and I know quite a few people who have actually moved between academia and industry and back and forward and it’s trying to keep that door open. Not to say, ‘Oh, you jumped ship. We don’t want you anymore,’ and a lot of that comes back down to the relationship. I would very much hope that my postdocs who have left academia – and there were quite a number during the pandemic – I would hope that they would remain in touch and come for guidance or something if it was relevant in the future. So final slide, please. In terms of advocacy, I think it’s really important that we just start speaking up about this and actually being willing to have difficult conversations and draw to attention people that are sitting in ivory towers in these offices that just haven’t realised how tough life can be for postdocs.

For me, one of the big ways of trying to advocate is things like what we’re doing this afternoon, getting involved in Prosper Network, listening to you, hearing other suggestions. I remember the previous one of these meetings. I came away with some very definite and concrete pointers. I think that by doing this and through the network and other schemes that are available, we will hopefully really empower our postdocs and they will hopefully have a much more fulfilled life than they seem to have at times.

So those are my few reflections, but I am very, very happy to discuss any of it further at any point. Thank you.

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Supporting our postdocs is a lot about being human, and being open, and not going in with a blinkered view of what worked for us, or what worked for our colleagues, might be appropriate for others. I wanted to say a little bit first about where I work, because I think it does bring some different opportunities, and maybe a few challenges being in such a specialist research institute.

I’ll tell you a little bit about my experience of supporting postdocs, and then just at the end about institutional approaches we’re embarking on. So I work at the School of Tropical Medicine, which is a research-intensive university, and also a charity. One thing that brings with it, we find that many of the people that join LSTM are extremely motivated by the charitable work we do, the mission of the institute, which is about supporting disadvantaged, improving health outcomes for disadvantaged populations across the globe. That’s great, and that brings in a real diversity of people that are all with a common ethos and align around this mission. We work in very specialist research areas and being quite small, our facilities are adapted to that, the facilities here on the Liverpool campus.

So both those features can mean that sometimes when I’m talking to postdocs about future research opportunities, they’re reluctant, not reluctant to move on per se, but been trying to find an equivalent, trying to think where else they could have the research facilities and an organisation that they feel aligned to. Often I think makes people a little bit less mobile. That’s a positive and also something that we need to be aware of as well.

A real positive of the organisation is that all the work we do, as most research these days, is all done in partnership. We work in a lot of very multidisciplinary, multi-country collaborative projects, and so that brings with it huge networks, and exposure to people who are working in different disciplines, working together. So that provides some opportunities.

We also have a strong focus on research uptake and translational work. So that also helps I think in, we work very hard with staff across the organisation, whether they’re in professional services roles, or students, or staff, just to think about how we translate this research into improved health outcomes. So as a result of that we have quite a large range of different training opportunities. We also have a lot of seminars, and visitors that come and talk about issues around policy, around community engagement, or other parts of the whole research ecosystem if you like, that are necessary to have an impact, and I think that does help open eyes a little bit about, it’s not just the researchers, many other parts in allied professions, and careers, and sectors where skills that you’ve learned from your postdoc career could be applied.

So when I was thinking about today’s session I was looking back at postdocs that I’d mentored over the years and just having a look to see where people have ended up, and I think many examples have already been given. Some have gone on to work in teaching roles, in medical writing, a number have gone to international organisations, so these might be international NGOs, Global Fund, UNICEF, etc., World Health Organisation, one person’s gone on to a policy role there.

Then because of the nature of what we do is lots of large consortia projects, we have many people that move into that more programmatic management role. So they might bring their specialist domain expertise, but combine that with other retraining, or learning they’ve already had as part of their postdoctoral careers on management and go down a programme manager track. That might be programme management in academia, or business development management. We’re seeing that increasingly a popular career pathway, and it’s something that we’re trying to work on internally to make sure we’ve got a clear pathway to progression in that discipline within LSTM.

Then of course industry as well. We host here a large product development partnership that is looking at new ways of controlling insect-borne diseases. So it’s like halfway between research and industry. It works very closely with the big agrochemical companies, so again having that on-site within the organisation gives quite a lot of exposure, and opportunities to meet directly with people working in industry, and understand a bit more about opportunities, and make those personal relationships that are so important.

So thinking about when people have, of course some postdocs are still working in academia, and thinking about those that have gone on to different career pathways, I think our reflection mostly that was self-motivated but of course in some cases it was forced by the end of funding, and fixed-term contracts, and the nature of the sector.

I think when looking at this more holistically across all the postdocs I’ve worked with, I work a lot in partnership with different organisations, different research organisations in Africa, and one of the things that we found, I’m not saying that this is universal across the continent by any means, but in some of the organisations we work with, the career structure is even more challenging in our African partner organisations, and the postdoc opportunities are very, very limited and this does require people to think more broadly about how they can use their transferable skills.

So thinking about the approach and what I’ve learned, and what advice I would pass on, as I say I think probably this has been covered really, by Alex and by Fi, so I’m really just repeating things that have already been said, but I think being open really, really important. Asking questions, but being open and generous with context, and networks, and invitations, and just giving out that opportunity for postdocs to be exposed to different meetings, different people, etc.

I think being realistic as well and having those honest conversations and thinking about encouraging postdocs to think about what are their own personal strengths and weaknesses, but also their own motivating factors, and their own personal situation, and mobility. By that I mean mobility to move around the country or not. I think it’s one of the big flaws in academia which I hope, and I think is perhaps decreasing a little bit, but this constant pressure to move, to up sticks and relocate. That might be good, and it can be good, but it’s not suitable for everybody.

We need to be realistic and thinking about the personal circumstances, and how that might affect their careers. Mostly being realistic myself and thinking in these career conversations, I myself, have been lucky to work and interact with people in different sectors, and they’ve gone down different career pathways, but of course I’m no expert in any of these, and what I can try and do is make those connections, but just not trying to judge, not trying to push one pathway or another, just to listen and offer advice.

I think we’ve also heard about the importance of keeping in touch. I think our alumni networks of previous postdocs are really, really valuable and I’ve on occasion invited people that have gone on to quite different career pathways back to meet with our current staff and just give a talk, or just be there for a coffee and have a chat, and answer questions, or be there at the end of an email, but making use of those networks as well to support current postdocs.

Then I think really important, again we’ve heard this before, but really important about being positive. I think the language that we use around this is just so important and avoiding these negative connotations about jobs outside academia. I still hear all too frequently phrases such as, by senior people in the organisation when talking about career pathways, that say things like, ‘Not everyone can make it in academia,’ as if those people that don’t follow that career pathway have somehow not made it, it’s not been a positive choice. So I think we really do need to be careful with the language.

Then I guess I’ll finally just say a little bit about across the organisation because about a year ago I took on a new role as dean of research culture and integrity, and career pathways was one, when we did our consultation with our early career researchers, career pathways was something that was really high priority, to look at both what our career pathways are within the organisation, but also advice and support for people following different pathways.

One of the things we’ve been doing, been really scaling up recently, and has particularly worked very well, one of the things that did work well during the pandemic because a lot of it was online, when people’s research maybe was on hold, was we did a really big push on training and knowledge exchange, and celebrating knowledge exchange, and those sort of transferable skills that postdocs can acquire. So I guess both from the sense of looking at the transferable skills that you get from your role, but also about how we transfer our knowledge from our research, and how we encourage and accelerate research uptake.

So this has included a whole, I think we ran just under 40 different courses over the last 18 months or so, and some of them are very short, just one- or two-hour seminars, but others are longer, six-week courses that might be around commercialisation and spinouts, and that’s not necessarily that everybody will use that information on a spinout company, but it helps people learn about their language, and the way in which, the different language that we use in different sectors as well, and I think it equips you a little bit better for perhaps interviews or discussions across sectors. Also things about capacity strengthening, programme management, just a whole range of different transferable skills, and I think that’s been quite well received.

We’re trying to align that very much around the research development framework, the four different domains of what skills you gain as a researcher. We’ve also tried to build up on our external, we have an internal mentoring scheme, but we’re trying to build up a bit more of a network of external mentors, so people that have done postdoc careers but have gone on to work in other sectors, and that might be a very, one-off ad hoc meeting, or a more regular mentorship relationship.

Then we are looking again, I think it’s been said before as well, obviously receiving guidance, tailoring your CV, and understanding, giving examples of CVs from different sectors as well. Then a final thing really which we haven’t done so much of yet, but I really hope it will be something we’ll be focusing on in the next 6-to-12 months, is really celebrating alternative career pathways and having these much more visible as when we have our news items, we have a website, all organisations do, and it has news stories at the bottom, and a lot of them are about academic publications or collaborations.

So I’d like to see a lot more about what amazing things our postdocs have gone on to do, utilising training, or contacts, or skills they learned with us, trying to again get back to this idea of celebrating different career routes as well as, yes. So that’s sort of thoughts that I’ve collated along the lines.

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