Tutorial videos

We've put together a series of short tutorial videos to help guide you through the use of the Prosper portal and logged in user tools.

General
Postdocs and none of the above users
Institutional and managers of researchers users

You can also find more guidance here:

Technical FAQs to help you to use the portal and solve some technical issue you might encounter
Popular searches to help you explore the content of the portal

Prosper portal tour

This recording gives a general overview and tour of the portal aimed at staff with an interest in postdoc career development. So the point of view of this tour will be that of somebody looking to use the resources to support postdocs with their career development.

The portal can be accessed by all, without the need to create a login or cover the benefits of creating a login at the end.

From our home page, you can navigate to the three main areas of the site, grouped to face are three main user groups, ‘Postdocs’, ‘Managers of researchers’ and ‘Institutions’. And by ‘Institutions’, we refer to those users who are responsible for delivery of postdoc career development within their institution.

We’ll dip into the ‘Postdoc’ area first. Here, you’ll see by scrolling down that you can access the ‘Reflect’, ‘Explore’ and ‘Act’ sections and as you scroll down further you will see beneath this the ‘Career development navigator’, the ‘Learning and Development’ section and the self-guided Career coaching resources in the ‘Coaching ourselves’ section.

We’re going to start off by taking a look at the ‘Career development navigator’. This page provides a map aimed at helping postdocs who might perhaps be taking themselves through the Prosper resources or aren’t clear of where to start. It has a selection of resources from each of the ‘Reflect’, ‘Explore’, and ‘Act’ sections that the postdocs can choose from to move their career development forward. They can dip in as they choose, starting at any point. We’ve presented this as a linear path just for ease as we’ve had feedback from some postdocs that navigating a wealth of resources can be overwhelming for some. So this navigator is designed to make finding relevant information for them tractable.

So if we go back now to the ‘Postdoc’ home page, we can also see near the top of the page another way the postdocs can navigate around the site using the ‘Delve into the content below or start here’ button. This takes them to some suggested searches that we’ve organised around some commonly asked questions and it gives them a different way to orient themselves through the portal.

We’re now going to drop into the ‘Reflect’ section. This section is focused on enhancing postdocs self-awareness to aid their career development. The resources are grouped under titles on this landing page, each page has a description to help the postdocs find what they’re looking for. As an example, we’ll open the ‘Career audit’ page. So as you can see on this page, it’s got a brief description of what you’ll find on the page at the top. It then has a practical task and some suggested tasks a little further down, which logged in postdoc users can add directly to their own personal development plan. You’ll find these tasks peppered across a number of postdoc pages on the site, where relevant. This ‘Career audit’ page also has some examples given, as well as a narrative example and some reflective auditing, to help the postdocs put the task into context so that they can see it’s not just busy work.

All three ‘Reflect’, ‘Explore’, and ‘Act’ sections, if I go back to this main page, have got similarly organised landing pages to aid user navigation. I’ll not go into the ‘Explore’ and ‘Act’ sections now and I’ll leave these for you to have a look at, at your own pace.

Instead, I’m going to go next to the ‘Learning and development’ section. So this section is a cross cutting section across all of the post resources. So the resources here are located on particular pages within the site, but here we’ve brought them together and grouped them by the skill or topic that they address. So I will pop in to the ‘Time management’ section just as an example. And you’ll see that you get a brief description of what you’ll find on the page. And beneath that you have a playlist of videos and associated resources that you can download. If you’re logged in as an Institutional user, you will find under the related information any of the associated resources you are able to download, but in addition you’ll have notes on how to run the particular session if it’s available.

We’ll now navigate to the Career coaching resources, in ‘Coaching ourselves’. So as we were designing Prosper’s resources we found that career coaching was a really crucial, really crucial and valued aspect by the postdocs and whilst we were able to pay for professional career coaches during our pilot phase, we recognised that this might not be something all institutions wish to provide. This led us to create the career coaching resources that we present here. We also provide details on how to use those coaching resources if you’re an institution and want to use career coaching as part of your career development offering for your postdocs. But postdocs can also take themselves through these resources independently too.

So we’ll leave the postdoc section now, and we’ll head over to the ‘Managers of researchers’ section. So this section is grouped into four. The ‘Why Prosper’ section sells the benefits of career development to the manager of researcher audience and how Prosper can help with this. ‘Using Prosper’ gives a quick overview of what’s on offer in the portal from a manager’s point of view, highlighting the resources aimed directly at postdocs as well as for themselves as managers. The next two sections have the majority of the content of this part of the portal, so ‘manager resources’ has practical resources for staff managing postdocs to support their postdoc’s career development, these resources are grouped under thematic headings and are interspersed with advice and quotes from other managers of researchers. In addition, the ‘managers insights section’ provides a selection of case studies to aid peer learning. And finally, this page has some questions that aid peer learning and managers of researchers commonly face and so we’ve highlighted these here to help them find relevant resources fast.

Last but not least is ‘the PI network’ section. Here we will advertise forthcoming events open to all PIs across the sector, and it hosts the resources from previous sessions. These include a summary of the lessons learned shared by the attendee.

Finally, I’ll move on to the ‘Institutions’ section. So this is the section that is for institutional staff responsible for delivering postdoc career development. It’s broken into three main sections. The first focuses on ‘Why Prosper’, which details the benefits of using Prosper, a potted overview of Prosper and a contextualisation of Prosper based on literature and sector search that we did early on, to scope out what gaps in postdoc career development we could identify. The ‘Community of practice’ is the space we have for career development practitioners to share their thoughts, how they’re using Prosper through case studies and to be part of a community of practice. They can also share events to the events calendar if they wish to open them up to the sector and advertise them on our events calendar. Users need to be registered as Institutional staff to be able to submit content or events. The largest section here is the ‘Boosting postdoc career development section’ where we’ve provided everything that we think that you’ll need to get started using Prosper at your institution. Again, like the other large landing pages resources are grouped, thematically. I’ll just show you the ‘Choose and mode of delivery’ page as an example. Here you can decide if you want to run Prosper with a cohort of postdocs, or if you’d just like to signpost your Postdocs to it. or something in between. We’ve given examples of these three modes, of what it might look like at your institution, the amount of time and resources needed, to help you choose how you’d like to use Prosper at your institution. Here you can decide if you want to run Prosper with a cohort of postdocs or if you just want to signpost your postdocs to it or something in between. We’ve given examples of each of the three modes what this might look like and the amount of time and resources needed to help you choose how you’d like to use Prosper at your institution. The page also compares and contrasts the modes. We can go down to that section; details the specific Prosper resources available, the comparison of the mode of delivery, identify some potential running costs, give some recommendations and finally covers a couple of small case studies showing some ways Prosper is already being used.

Now we’ve covered the three main sections of the portal, there are a few small things I’d like to cover. You can navigate the longer pages using the ‘on this page’ tab. At the top left of the page, as you see, if you click on that, you can then see all of the different sections that are visible on the page, and you can click to jump straight to that section that you’re interested in.

If you scroll right to the bottom of any of our pages, you will find a ‘helpful links’ box right at the bottom. And it’s got all of the links to things such as our terms and conditions, the events calendar and the technical FAQ’s, which are super handy for some instructional videos on using the functionality you get as a logged in user. And obviously all the useful things that we think you’d want to be able to link to quickly.

Finally, the last thing I’ll highlight is the registration page. If you choose to register, and I’m assuming here that the majority of the audience watching this recording fit into the institutional staff member’s bracket, logging in will allow you to have your own dashboard as well as a postdoc dashboard, so that you can see what the postdocs see without having to create yourself a separate login.

If you register as a ‘postdoc’ or ‘none of the above’ you won’t be able to ask questions, comment or upload events, or case studies to the Institutions community of practice. ‘Institutional’ users and ‘Managers of researchers’ need to register with their .ac.uk e-mail address. ‘Postdocs’, and ‘none of the above’ user types can register with any e-mail address, as we want postdocs to be able to continue their career development regardless of which HEI they are working at, or if they are temporarily between contracts. If you’re an institutional staff member working at an institution outside of the UK, you can e-mail us to get a login.

Thank you.

Postdoc and none of the above user tutorials

Dashboard: overview tools

Content management tools

Welcome to this instructional video on how to use the Prosper Dashboard’s content management tools. In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through the features of the saved resources, saved searches, my history and my prioritised resources. By the end of the video, you’ll be equipped with the knowledge to efficiently manage your content and resources on the Prosper Dashboard. Let’s get started. To access saved resources, click on the ‘Saved Resources’ button in the Dashboard. When you’re logged in to the Prosper portal and you’re looking at a specific resource, you can click on the ‘Save to Use Later’ button to add that resource to your saved resources. Now, whenever you want to access these resources, just navigate to ‘My Resources’ in the portal dashboard and you’ll find all your saved content in one convenient location. The ‘Saved Searches’ feature is a powerful tool that helps you to quickly access your frequently used search queries. It saves you time by allowing you to reuse these searches instead of typing them repeatedly. Type in a search query, click ‘Search,’ and then if you want to save it, click on ‘Save Your Search.’ You’ll see this message which allows you to name your search and give it a specific label so that you can easily find it again. Now, your saved search is readily available under the ‘Saved Searches.’ Next time you need to perform that specific search, just click on the saved query and the results will appear instantly. The ‘My History’ feature keeps track of your recent activity on the Prosper portal. It serves as a handy trail of your viewed resources, making it easy to revisit them without having to remember all the details. As you can see, your most recent activities are listed here. It’s an excellent way to pick up where you left off or to retrace your steps to find a particular resource you recently accessed. The ‘My Prioritised Resources’ feature enables you to mark certain resources as high priority. This can be incredibly useful when you have a vast collection of saved resources, and you want to focus on the most important ones. When you are logged in and you are looking at content, you can easily mark a resource as prioritised by clicking the ‘Prioritise’ button. Your prioritised resources can be accessed, giving you quick access to the most critical content whenever you need it. You have now mastered the content management tools on the Prosper Dashboard.