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Engagement can enhance the reputation of Lancaster University and have wider societal benefits – economic, social, political and environmental.
Engagement can also help raise your profile and develop your career. If you are a researcher or academic then engagement can improve your research quality, outputs and impact. As a knowledge exchange professional services member of staff then your role can progress in many different directions.
Skills and knowledge development and PDRs
Your Performance Development Review (PDR) is a valuable discussion with your line manager that can help you reflect on and discuss how to think about, frame and plan your engagement. In doing so, you will be deciding your objectives, identifying any development/support to achieve these and determining how you will know they have been met. Visit the PDR webpages for support and guidance on PDRs. A PRD e-learning programme is available for LU staff. Made up of a number of modules it will help you understand the PDR process and how to make the best use of it for your own development.
Professional development frameworks are available for researchers and professional services staff, involved in engagement - details are below. They can be used in PDRs, professional development planning and career planning. They can also act as a useful checklist to help identify the skills you have developed as part of your engagement activities. This can help you develop and progress in your current role or identify the transferable skills to help you move to a different career or sector.
Supporting your career development
Organisational Development (OD) has development opportunities for Lancaster University staff that can support career development.
This includes:
Strategic Career Planning for Researchers and Academics (under Managing my Career section). This workshop allows you to reflect on your career choices and progression to date and consider how to strategically position yourself for success in the future.
MyPS Career@Lancaster Programme. This programme aims to develop and empower Professional Services staff to take control of and proactively manage their careers.
Coaching and mentoring
Coaching and mentoring are development approaches based on the use of one-to-one conversations to enhance your skills, knowledge or work performance.
They are terms that are often used interchangeably, although there are distinctions. The CIPD factsheet on Coaching and Mentoring highlights some of the differences.
Tab Content: Coaching
Coaching can be a useful way of developing skills and abilities and can help you with career planning. It can also help deal with issues and challenges before they become a major problem.
A coaching session takes place as a conversation between the coach and the coachee (person being coached), and it focuses on helping the coachee discover answers for themselves. As such the coach does not need to be an expert in your field. By listening and asking the right questions a coach can lead you to come to your own solutions.
The University has a bank of coaches that can provide 1-to-1 coaching for staff. There are also coaching information sessions to find out more and determine if coaching is for you. Visit the coaching and mentoring pages of the organisational development webpages for more information.
Tab Content: Mentoring
Mentoring in the workplace is typically when a more experienced colleague (the mentor) shares their knowledge and skills to support the development of a less experienced colleague (mentee). It uses many of the techniques such as questioning, listening, clarifying and reframing that are also associated with coaching.
To set up a mentoring relationship you may start by speaking to your Head of Department or Departmental Officer about mentoring arrangements within your department/division. Some departments do run a mentor matching scheme, others require individual staff to identify their own mentor. Your mentor need not be from the same department/division and could be from another institution. If you are new to Lancaster you may wish to seek advice from colleagues to help you identify your mentor.
Resources to support a mentoring relationship:
- Good practice in mentoring for academic development - this OD workshop is for LU academic and research staff and covers the basic principles of mentoring and introduces you to some mentoring skills, including those of active listening and how to have a meaningful dialogue and provides advice on the mentor and mentee relationship.
- Mentoring Handbook - guidance on listening skills, asking questions and providing feedback
- Dr Kay Guccione, Mentoring Specialist, Head of Research Culture and Researcher Development at the University of Glasgow has provided the following excellent resources, which have value for both academic and professional services colleagues:
The videos below are taken from these resources and have valuable advice on choosing and asking someone to be your mentor.
Engagement and your academic promotion case
The academic promotion criteria align with the University’s strategy, sharing a triple focus on research, teaching and engagement as well as recognising contributions to effective leadership in each of the three focus areas.
If you are considering making an academic promotion case using the engagement criteria, you are advised to familiarise yourself with the following documents:
- The Academic Promotions Engagement Criteria (LU staff only)
- Your Department and Faculty Engagement Strategies.
- The University’s Strategic Plan.
You are encouraged to explain, in the engagement section of your case, how your engagement activity is linked to your Department and Faculty Engagement Strategies and the University's Strategic Plan.
Lancaster University staff can visit the academic promotions intranet pages for more details of the process and supporting documents.
Organisational Development (OD) co-ordinate a programme in the Michaelmas term that is aimed at giving academic and research staff the best chance of achieving academic promotion. This programme has been designed to ensure academic promotion is available to all staff, and to encourage staff that have been underrepresented in the past to put forward academic promotion cases. Visit the OD academic and researcher Learning and Development webpages for information on upcoming sessions and the academic promotions intranet pages for recordings and slides from previous sessions.
Dr Cath Hill, Lecturer in Social Work, made a successful academic promotion case. Listen to her talk about how she used her engagement activity to make a strong promotion case and sharing some tips for success.
Creating new research opportunities
Integrating engagement into a research project can result in higher quality and more impactful research. Some research councils and research funders such as Wellcome are taking an engaged approach. They ask researchers to integrate engagement into the design of their project, to be inclusive of a range of stakeholders and to work collaboratively to ensure the relevance of the research. Taking an engaged approach to your research project may enhance the success of any research proposals that you submit.
Enterprise engagement activities such as consultancy can create further opportunities within your research field.
Professor Steve Young from the Department of Accounting and Finance explains:
‘I take the money as research funding to support a research team - what the (consultancy) projects do for me is to provide a resource that I can fund research through – whether that is PhD students or research associates that is really beneficial to me, because it allows me to leverage my activities. It also provides a route to engagement and impact.’
Watch Steve's on his talking head video to find out more.