REFLEX: Responsive and Flexible Career Development Framework for Researchers
In today´s ever changing world, systematic and focused career management is becoming increasingly important for both researchers and their employers. However research organisations face the challenge of how to guide researchers through this process and how to enable them to become creative, critical and autonomous intellectual risk takers.
Currently variety of career development tools is available, some of them are formal and structured, other are based on informal and self-directed approach. But how to ensure that these tools, usually designed for the use in certain research environments, can be transferred to other contexts? And how to make them more reflexive to the increasing variability of career patterns and opportunities which arise with the creation of brand new jobs in the near future?
REFLEX - A two-year project joining forces of partners from five European countries, will address these challenges through the designing of intelligent career development framework based on the direct involvement of researchers, their employers, HR departments, EURAXESS Service Centres and other relevant actors.
What steps will we take to create this framework?
- The pool of existing career development tools and practices will be collected and analysed with regard to their applicability in different national contexts.
- Scenario workshops with researchers and other local stakeholders will be organised in every project country to learn about the country specific situation.
- A set of modules will be defined to describe certain practices, procedures and skills, which will be combined into the common framework and its country specific mutations. The framework will integrate and complement existing tools into the context sensitive models of career development services.
- Practical testing and implementation of the framework carried out within the project will help to spread these tools towards the researchers and other stakeholders.
- Training model scheme focusing on the development of career management skills for researchers will be designed, adapted, and tested to different national contexts.
- Mutual learning and feedback activities will ensure the coherence and continuous improvement of all project outcomes.
- To increase the transferability of this framework to other national and institutional contexts, European level workshop will be organised together with other EURAXESS networks and organisations representing the researchers and their employers.