During the 25 years that I spent at the University of Northampton (and its predecessor institutions) I had a number of official roles, including heading up research within a faculty, chairing committees, and so forth. One of the most fulfilling of these was developing and leading the generic training programme that all postgraduate researchers across the university had to undertake.

These workshops covered a wide range of skills including strategies for literature searching, maintaining momentum in the middle stages of the journey, different approaches to writing and structuring a thesis, preparing for the oral defence, writing for different audiences, and dealing with different expectations and conflicts with supervisors. The last of these was run by Karin who brought to bear her skills as a relationship therapist and trainer.

Over the past few months I’ve been asked by a couple of universities to run my “Developing an online profile as a researcher” workshop virtually, most recently yesterday for Hartpury University. In this session I get the postgraduate researchers to think about their motivations for having an online profile, the different kinds of platforms that are available, the distinction between “shops window” and “market stall” approaches, and suggest a strategy and rules of engagement for using social media professionally. All of this is based on my own experiences from the last 20+ years of using online systems to promote and disseminate research to peers and to wider society.

If this is of interest and you’d like to discuss having me run this workshop (or indeed any of the others) for your graduate school or department, please use my Contact page to get in touch.