Research Management as a Profession
14 December 2021
9:15 – 12:30 (CET)
Online workshop, hosted by Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
Target group
Researcher managers and administrators, researchers, technical support staff, students, externals
Objective
Currently, to strengthening the European Research Area, the European Commission asks for manifold transformative processes at the European universities. In many cases, neither the institutions nor their staff members are fully prepared for these changes in their working environments. In addition, it is becoming increasingly difficult for researchers to simultaneously pursuing excellent research and taking care for the complex administration of related processes. They therefore need strong partners in their support units, who have an overview of the variety of on-going developments, challenges, and trends at institutional, national, European and international level. Those partners must have the capacity to comprehensively supporting the research community. Still, there are many challenges related to exactly defining their role and describing their mandatory educational background.
Content
The European Association of Research Managers and Administrators (EARMA) represents the largest community of professionals in the respective field in Europe. EARMA strongly supports the professionalization of European research management. In the framework of the EARMA Academy, it offers a wide range of training programs for newcomers up to senior level research managers and university leading administrators. You learn about their programs and get an insight about what it means being part of the EARMA community. Two more interventions by Silvana Di Bono (UNIPA) and Nicole Birkle (JGU) will report from personal experiences and trainings that they have taken advantage of. Starting from these three interventions, we want to discuss what professionalization in research management really means. We want to find out, to what extent the continued training of staff members in this area is beneficial to their professional careers on the one hand, and to the further development of staff units at universities on the other hand.