3. "The Academic Playbook"

Ahhh, 'The Academic Playbook'. This week I explore the six skills you must perfect if you want to have a long and successful academic research career.

'The Academic Playbook' consists of a list of skills you must perfect in order to have a long academic research career. These are the skills you will be consistently judged on, throughout your career, and need to demonstrate to progress through the ‘The Academic Hierarchy’. Mastering these skills ensures you are a successful and well-rounded researcher.

The Six Skills You Need to Perfect As an Academic Researcher:

Skill 1: Publish (a lot).

There is a truism in research; ‘Publish or Perish’. This may sound extreme but publications are your lifeblood as an academic researcher.

To be a successful academic researcher, you must attract your own funding, the more senior you become the more expensive you become for a senior researcher to employ you. All grant funding is based on your productivity. Productivity is defined as any action you can add to your CV, including:

• (invited) presentations,

• publications,

• book chapters

• funding success (Skill 2),

• research prizes and accolades (Skill 3) and

• research services (Skill 5).

The Lessons:

• Be an author (co-author) every opportunity you are given.

• Demonstrate an increasing and forward trajectory in authoring publications as you become a more experienced researcher.

But also consider:

• Being an author is a must for your career, but make sure your name has value and is synonymous with quality research. If you can be an author/ co-author on a journal article but you do not believe in the science, maybe reconsider the importance of being an author on that publication.

Skill 2: Attract grant funding.

Seek grant funding from multiple funding sources. This will sharpen your grant writing skills as you will have to think about how to describe the value of your research to different funders so they will literally invest in you to complete your research. If you are successful in attracting funding (even if it's only a few hundred or thousand dollars) you are building your funding credibility and demonstrating to future funders that your research appeals to a wide range of funders/

stakeholders.

The Lessons:

• Balance the time it takes to write a grant and its success rate, against the time it takes to write a publication. When you write a grant, success is not guaranteed; a publication is forever.

• The more grants you write the quicker you will become at writing future grants. Use your past grant applications as a starting point for a new grant application, just keep on working on it until you perfect it, or the next grant is due, whichever comes first.

• Funding success can be a double edged sword - the more funding you receive, the more productive you are expected to be. If you receive funding but are not productive, this may be considered as a factor against you in future grant applications.

• Outside of academia, your job will (likely) not be based on grant success. To hire you, the company should have the money to pay your salary regardless of funding success. If not, this should be made clear at the interview stage.

Skill 3: Present your findings at conferences.

Travelling overseas for conferences is one of the main perks of being a researcher!!

Most research institutes abide by the rule that to attend a conference you need to have an abstract accepted. That is, you send in an abstract about your research to a conference. Multiple independent researchers will review your abstract to decide whether to accept or reject the abstract. If it is accepted, they will also decide whether your research will be presented via a poster or an oral presentation. Either way, your accepted abstract will add an output to your CV.

Conferences are also an amazing opportunity to speak with other researchers in your field and find potential collaborators.

The Lessons:

• Attending conferences is an effective way to increase your outputs, as each publication could count twice - once as a conference output and once as a publication. Note, once a piece of research is published, you cannot write the same research up as an abstract to a conference.

• Attending multiple conferences is expensive after considering registration fees, accomodation and flights. However, in every city there are special interest groups concerning all aspects of research. Become a member of any group relevant to your discipline or methodology and you may be able to present your findings at a local meeting. This will boost your number of outputs, sharpen your presentation skills and provide the opportunity to network with local researchers.

• Need some research prizes and accolades? They are generally given out at conferences. This is a great addition to your CV as your research has been objectively, singled out by experts in the field.

Fact: Ever wonder how some academics have the funds to attend multiple international conferences? If you are invited to present your findings at a conference then the conference will generally pay for you to attend it, which includes conference registration, flights and accomodation!!

Skill 4: Collaborate with other researchers locally and internationally.

Collaborations are really important. They:

• boost your productivity (through publications and presentations),

• demonstrate your status as an expert, and

• (hopefully) extend your research with a method or dataset that is unavailable in your own research group or jurisdiction.

In establishing a collaboration know your value. Reflect on what unique skills or data you bring to the collaboration. Think about who or what type of researcher you want to work with and a question you could collaborate on. Then be brave and back yourself! Reach out to them and see what happens.

The Lessons:

• All researchers are unique, some you will work with really well, for others it will be a struggle. If you are entering into a new collaboration, consider working on a small project to figure out if your collaboration is productive. Once the project is finished you can decide if you want to do another project together or not.

If yes, see if there is another question you can answer together.

If not, that is OK, there are plenty of other researchers in the world who you can do interesting research with.

• Once you find a collaborator you trust and can work well with, and the collaboration is productive, keep working with them. You will be twice as productive as you can both be the primary researcher on different projects and be a co-author on each others work.

• Academic researchers all over the world are judged on these same criteria, they are not jurisdiction specific, so a collaboration is beneficial for all involved parties.

• You can be part of multiple collaborations at once. Just make sure you can give enough time and energy to each collaboration as you don't want to become the difficult one who is unavailable most of the time and cannot deliver their research to deadlines.

• Make sure you have a good reputation as a collaborator, this generally means delivering high quality research in the time frame discussed and completing your share of the work. Also, communicate any issues with meeting any of these expectations. Research projects rarely go to plan so be open with any difficulties or roadblocks you encounter.

Tip: if your collaborator presents your research at a conference, this counts as an output for you too!

Skill 5: Complete research services.

Research services are acts that on the surface do not appear to contribute to your outputs, instead they are a way to give back to the research community. Examples of these services include:

• peer reviewing articles for journals or conference abstracts,

• sitting on research or ethics committees,

• reviewing grants,

• being an invited panel member for a talk or conference,

• participating / volunteering in a local research special interest group and

• organising a research event at a research institute.

The Lessons:

• Research services can be time consuming. You do not need to complete every service. But when an opportunity presents itself consider whether it shows a different skill or service you have not yet completed and is missing on your CV. If it fills a hole in your CV, then consider accepting it.

• Think of every service you complete as a new line in your CV. Try to make that CV as long as possible.

• Respect the work you are reviewing. There is a researcher sitting behind every piece of work you read. Critique the research but deliver your comments in the way you would want to receive them.

• Ensure your reviews are high quality. Many people will read the review you write, and you won't necessarily know who they are. If the review is of high quality, you will likely be asked to review for them in the future.

• Completing these services is another way to meet researchers you do not normally interact with and may present potential collaboration opportunities.

Skill 6: Teach and/or supervise students or more junior researchers.

As you progress through your career you will have the opportunity to work with more junior researchers and potentially teach. These opportunities may be difficult and time-consuming but they are very rewarding and you will likely learn things you didn’t even know you needed to learn. Consequently you will become a better researcher.

Teaching and supervising junior researchers reinforces to potential employers and funders that you are an independent researcher. If they see you as independent and productive, then you have a higher chance of getting the job and/or grant.

The Lessons:

• Teaching may prolong your career in academia. Universities hire teachers who may only teach or may pursue their own research interests in addition to teaching. As the university pays you as a teacher, there is less pressure for you to attract your own research funding. As you become more successful at attracting research funding, you can choose to reduce the number of hours you teach and potentially become a research-only academic.

• Students require teaching, which is time-consuming. However, students are also eager, motivated for an output and free (you do not pay them to do research for you).

• Also, every now and again you will come across a highly motivated and talented research student and it will be a pleasure to teach them. Think back to your early career, there was always someone there to teach you…...And if there wasn't, be that someone that you wished for.

What skills have been the easiest or hardest for you to learn? Are there any other skills you have needed to learn to be a successful academic? Comment below or email me your thoughts.

BB

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

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'The Academic Hierarchy'

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