CEDARS has now been open for nearly a week, and we so far have 288 responses, which is exceptional as my records from 2019 tell me that – at this point – we were well below that.
So, first of all, a huge THANK YOU to all of you who have completed the survey so far.
Thank you too to those of you who have booked time in to complete it, but haven’t got there yet. We know you’re on the case.
For others, I’ll be sending you out a link reminder tomorrow.
It’s too early to be making any real analysis of the data, but with one week done, I thought I’d give you a glimpse of some of the issues that are surfacing. These include some challenges that we are aware of. But they also include some other things that we’ll want to also look into carefully, including:
- Recognition in a host of areas ranging from contributions to grant writing, to supervision of students and other research colleagues. We know that, with future positions often heavily reliant upon CVs and reputation, that recognition is a key issue, so it’s good to have some concrete examples.
- A need for more information about university policies to do with redundancy and redeployment.
- Support in how to think about careers, including those beyond academia.
- Support for those of you managing others. Many of you want more information on how to do this well, but are struggling to find it, or to get practice in how to do it as well as you could.
- The huge impact of the COVID ‘year’, and its effect on your working environment, workloads and your career planning.
That last point is clearly something that will dominate the 2021 survey. And it’s enormously valuable data for us as we work out how we can best support many of you back into working patterns that are more familiar.
I’ll try and update more as new data comes in.
In the meantime, please encourage as many of your pathway 2 colleagues as you can to complete the survey.
And… stay safe!