AAS | Events | 14-15 February 2008

The issues that Group A feel are worth highlighting are career progression and gaining independence; PhD education (when should we learn these skills?); conferences for young researchers, as distinct from attending them, with an opportunity to present; helping academics to mentor as a core activity, with recognition of this; acceptance of family issues, childcare duties, allowing for career breaks and flexibility in hours; and because there is no mid-career support, recognition of this gap.

Group C say that we need to have a system to measure and reward good mentors for research officers and students. There should be a formal system, possibly set up through the ARC and NHMRC. However, it should not interfere with informal mentoring, that is, cake and beers with supervisors. (This cake thing, and beers, has done really well today.) It would be good to have a system to match up early and mid-career researchers with career mentors.

Group D want advice on different career paths and directions. They want opportunities to present work and communicate, accessing other fields, for example industry. There is also a comment in their notes about expectations. They want to see context – historical, philosophical, cultural. They would like to see more networking with associated introductions. They are interested in the sourcing of both internal and external mentors, and they are interested in co-mentoring. They also make the interesting point that part of mentoring would be observing other people mentoring, so observation of senior mentors in action. They also speak about formalising and monitoring at an institutional level.

I know more about what happened in Group B, because that is the group that I was with. There was an emphasis on the importance of mentoring for strategic planning, which was not formally listed on the sheet of suggestions for discussion. In addition to strategic planning, we gave as our top five: time management, finance, grant writing, when and where to publish – as in, when is a piece of work ready to go out, how to think strategically about your publishing – and experiments devised and run properly. Then we thought that there was actually a spectrum of mentors, and Jenny Graves expressed that very well. It goes from those things that are the individual's responsibility, through a line manager, through somebody else within the institution, but then also, moving further and further out on the spectrum, both within the institution and also outside, with things like the societies, the Academy and so on. (Jenny wrote it down and our minute secretary, David Clifford, has recorded it, I hope.)

Also, we were quite interested in the idea of adding another box, if you like, to the ARC and NHMRC grant applications, where as well as having chief investigators, partner investigators and so on there would be an MI, a mentoring investigator. So the reviewers would see the mentor's brief CV and publications or something like that – that mentor would be nominated on the grant proposal – but in the systems we discussed there was no particular drain on ARC or NHMRC resources for this person, but rather a recognition that they had a responsibility to see that things worked well and that the success of the project would be noted against their name and so, obviously, they would be playing a part in annual reporting and the final reports that the grants gave.

So I guess the purpose of this discussion was just to let the different groups see what the other groups were thinking, and if there are things that resonate at all, just to take them back tomorrow to your groups.

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