SR Shaw
Teaching, grants, and publications are necessary, but not sufficient for success as an early career scholar. Graduate students and postdocs acquire numerous skills that will support their careers as academics. Many of these skills are taught formally through coursework, seminars, or didactic instruction in research labs. Mentoring provides a semi-formal mechanism for learning skills, yet the specific skills learned are idiosyncratic to whatever the mentor knows and values. There are inevitable gaps in the skills required to be a successful early career researcher. Some of the critical skills that facilitate success, but are rarely taught formally or semi-formally are: proposing budgets, managing lab finances, equipment purchases and the bidding process, human resources issues, running conferences, time management, leadership, supporting diversity, progress monitoring, communicating ethics, handling complaints, giving feedback, personnel selection, mentoring, organizing teams, long-term planning, chairing meetings, and so on. It is not practical to add courses every time the need for a new critical skill is identified. Graduate students and post docs can be strategic and efficient in gaining critical skills informally.
Identifying basic skills and scientific knowledge required to conduct research and become an emerging expert in the field are challenging enough. Simply learning the core skills required to be able to make contributions to scientific knowledge is more than a full-time job. Learning specific skills is above and beyond what are already far too many hours in the library, classroom, and lab. An approach to developing the specific skills may be informal, but must be efficient, strategic, and mindful. A strong early career researcher cannot count on important skills being developed accidentally.
The major challenge is that activities promoting learning specific skills are often thankless activities. There may be few CV lines generated by pursuing critical skills. Quite often a principal investigator, mentor, or supervisor will discourage these activities as detracting from the basic scientific enterprise. Most of the best approaches to learning critical skills involve the dreaded service activities. Service is more than a thankless set of activities to be avoided, but a section of the CV that many TT search committees consider, but rarely see much of in post-doc or new grads. If you curate your service activities carefully, then they are a mechanism for developing critical skills.
Given the challenges, there are two processes to be followed for gaining of critical skills: the two-fer and the focus.
The two-fer is a basic exercise in efficiency. You want to be involved in non-core activities that serve at least two purposes, but require the work of one task. Never volunteer for a task unless the work is reasonable and you will receive at least two positive outcomes. One of those outcomes must be a generalizable critical skill that you may not be able to develop elsewhere. Here are some examples:
· When invited to review a manuscript for a journal, it is often a low priority and should often be declined. Yet, if you want to eventually serve on the editorial board, learn the ins and outs of journal editorship, or wish better understand journal decision making processes; then take on the task, do quality work, and leave a note for the editor that you wish to learn more about the journal.
· Be your lab manager. Tedious work, but many critical skills are developed in this position. In fact, when on a university search committee for candidates with many pubs, I carefully look to see if they are a lab leader or simply a frequent hanger-on co-author on lab work.
· Service as a member of a professional association is fine. Better is service as secretary or treasurer. Then you can learn organizational efficiency, basic bookkeeping, and so on.
· Initiate. Launch a journal club, start a student association, begin a multiple literature review project, or start a small conference.
· Propose a special issue of a scholarly journal. This is a classic case of efficiency. Propose a special issue of a journal, which most editors value. Then the outcomes are: you are an author of the intro paper, you are the author of a substantive paper, you invite leaders in the field and they start to know you, you get a CV line for being a guest editor, folks who appreciate the invitation now owe you a favor, you are perceived by the field as a leader in the area, papers in special issues are read and cited more than single publications, and in some areas a special issue can lead to an edited book. Super efficient and a great way to learn leadership, organizational, management, and editorial skills.
The focus involves what to look for so that you can benefit, develop, and practice specific skills from your work.
· Know exactly which critical skills you wish to develop. The more specific, the better.
· Take the time to learn formal rules and policies of any organization. University accounting procedures, Robert’s Rules of Order, organizational bylaws, and so on. The boring stuff. If you are going to play the game, you must know the rules. After you learn the formal rules, then learn the informal rules, traditions, and cultures that affect any system.
· Attend to positive role models (and anti-role models). You can learn a lot by observing how others perform critical skills (or how they do things the wrong way).
· Understand the role of context and culture. Be sensitive to the dynamics of every group or organization. Empathy and advocacy are valuable skills.
Learning the critical skills that are extracurricular and informal is possible. The most efficient mechanism to learn these skills is through service activities. However, knowing exactly which skills that you need requires professional maturity to evaluate what you know, what you do not know, and what you need to know for your career goals. After that evaluation, then use of the two-fer and focus models will make informal instruction in the critical skills as efficient as possible.
Feel free to comment on this website or via email at steven.shaw@mcgill,ca