Cash for Questions | Research Funding, Policy and Development

Jobs in university administration

papers — This man had hair before he started shortlisting.....

The Guardian Higher Education network recently hosted a careers clinic on ‘How to break into university administration‘, and I posted a few thoughts that I thought might be useful. According to my referral stats for my blog, a number of visitors end up here with similar questions about both recruitment processes and what it’s like to work for a university. I think it’s mainly my post on Academics vs University Administrators part 94 that gets those hits. I’ve also been asked by friends and relatives for my very limited wisdom on this topic.

I also think it’s good to share this information, because one of my worries whenever I’m involved in recruiting staff is that we end up employing people who are best at writing applications and being interviewed. In my particular line of work, that’s fine – if you can’t write a strong job application against set criteria, you probably shouldn’t be helping academics with grant applications. But that’s the exception.

So what follows is me spilling the beans on my very limited experience of recruiting administrative staff in two institutions, both as panel chair and as an external panel member. I’m not an HR expert. I’m not a careers advisor. But for what it’s worth, what follows is an edited and expanded version of what I posted on the Guardian page.

——————————————————————————

When an administrative job is advertised, a document called a ‘person specification’ is drawn up. Formats vary, but usually this is a list of skills, attributes, experiences, and attitudes that are either classed as “essential” or “desirable”. Often it’ll say which part of the recruitment process these will be examined (application, aptitude test, or interview).

In all of the recruitment I’ve been involved in, this is an absolutely vital document. Decisions about who to short list for interview and who not to and ultimately who to appoint will be made on the basis of this person specification and justified on that basis. And we must be able to justify our decisions if challenged. As panel chair I was required to (briefly) explain reasons for rejection for everyone we didn’t interview, and then everyone we didn’t appoint. I’m sure the importance of the person specification isn’t unique to universities.

To get an interview, an applicant needs to show that they meet all of the essential criteria and as many of the desirable ones as possible. My advice to applicants is that if they don’t have some of the desirable criteria, they should make the case for having something equivalent, or a plan to get that skill. For example, if a person spec lists “web design” as desirable and you can’t do it, express willingness to go on a course. For bonus points, find a course that you’d like to go on. If you’re offered an interview, you can use the person spec to predict the interview questions – they’ll be questions aimed at getting evidence about your fit with the person spec. You could do worse than to imagine that you’re on the interview panel and think of the questions you’d ask to get evidence about candidates’ fit with those criteria. Chances are you won’t be a million miles off.

Unfortunately, if you don’t meet the essential criteria, it’s a waste of time applying. You won’t get an interview.

As an applicant, your job in your application form is to make it as obvious as possible to the panel members that you meet the criteria. Back it up with evidence and at least some detail. If a criterion concerns supporting committees with minute taking and agenda prep, don’t just assert you’ve done it – say a bit about the committee, and what you did exactly, and how you did it. Culturally, we’re not good at blowing our own trumpets, and a good and effective way round this is to just stick to the facts. Don’t tell, show.

Panel members really appreciate it when applicants make it easy – they can just look down the person spec, look through the application, and tick, tick, tick, you’re on the potential interviewees pile. Don’t make panel members guess or try to interpret what you say to measure it against the criteria. There’s nothing more frustrating than an applicant who might be exactly what we need, but who hasn’t made a strong enough or clear enough case, especially about transferable skills.

Panel members can tell the difference between an application that’s being tweaked slightly and sent to every job vacancy, and one that’s been tailored for that particular vacancy. Do that, put in the effort, and you will stand out, because so many people don’t. Take the application seriously, and you’ll be taken seriously in turn. And spell check and proof read is your friend. A good admin vacancy in a university in the current climate attract hundreds of applications. That’s not an exaggeration.

Two other tips. One is always ask for feedback if you’re unsuccessful at interview. In every process I’ve been involved in, there’s useful feedback there for you if you want it. Even if it’s “someone else was better suited, and there’s nothing you could have done differently/better”, you still want to know that. If you were good, chances are that the university in question would like you to apply again in the future. The second is to always take up any offer of an informal conversation in advance of applying. If you can ask sensible questions that show you’ve read all the documents thoroughly, there’s a chance that you’ll be remembered when you apply. You won’t get special treatment, but it can’t hurt.

Jobs will be advertised in a variety of places, depending on the grade and the degree of specialism needed. Universities will have a list of current vacancies on their websites, and often use local papers for non-specialist roles. Jobs.ac.uk is also widely used, and has customisable searches/vacancy emails, as well as some more good advice on job seeking.

Finally….. every job interview process that I’ve been involved with has attracted outstanding candidates. Some with little work experience, some with NHS or local authority admin experience, many from the private sector too. Universities are generally good employers and good places to work. It’s competitive at the best of times, and will be doubly so now.

————————————————————————–

The fact that most of you reading this not only (a) already have university jobs; and (b) know perfectly well how the recruitment process works isn’t lost on me. But this one’s for my random google visitors. Normal service will be resuming shortly.

Are institutions over-reacting to impact?

Interesting article and leader in this week’s Times Higher on the topic of impact, both of which carry arguments that “university managers” have over-reacted to the impact agenda. I’m not sure whether that’s true or not, but I suspect that it’s all a bit more complicated than either article makes it appear.

The article quotes James Ladyman, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol, as saying that university managers had overreacted and created “an incentive structure and environment in which an ordinary academic who works on a relatively obscure area of research feels that what they are doing isn’t valued”.

If that’s happened anywhere, then obviously things have gone wrong. However, I do think that this need to be understood in the context of other groups and sub-groups of academics who likewise feel – or have felt – undervalued. I can well understand why academics whose research does not lend itself to impact activities would feel alienated and threatened by the impact agenda, especially if it is wrongly presented (or perceived) as a compulsory activity for everyone – regardless of their area of research, skills, and comfort zone – and (wrongly) as a prerequisite for funding.

Another group of researchers who felt – and perhaps still feel – under-valued are those undertaking very applied research. It’s very hard for them to get their stuff into highly rated (aka valued) journals. Historically the RAE has not been kind to them. The university promotions criteria perhaps failed to sufficiently recognise public engagement and impact activity – and perhaps still does. While all the plaudits go to their highly theoretical colleagues, the applied researchers feel looked down upon, and struggle to get academic recognition. If we were to ask academics whose roles are mainly teaching (or teaching and admin) rather than research, I think we may find that they feel undervalued by a system which many of them feel is obsessed by research and sets little store on excellent (rather than merely adequate) teaching. Doubtless increased fees will change this, and perhaps we will hear complaints of the subsequent under-valuing of research relative to teaching.

So if academics working in non-impact friendly (NIFs, from now on) areas of research are now feeling under-valued, they’re very far from alone. It’s true that the impact agenda has brought about changes to how we do things, but I think it could be argued that it’s not that the NIFs are now under valued, but that other kinds of research and academic endeavour – namely applied research and impact activities (ARIA from now on) – are now being valued to a greater degree than before. Dare I say it, to an appropriate degree? Problem is, ‘value’ and ‘valuing’ tends to be seen as a zero sum game – if I decide to place greater emphasis on apples, the oranges may feel that they have lost fruit bowl status and are no longer the, er, top banana. Even if I love oranges just as much as before.

Exactly how institutions ‘value’ (whatever we mean by that) NIF research and ARIA is an interesting question. It seems clear to me that an institution/school/manager/grant giving body/REF/whatever could err either way by undervaluing and under-rewarding either. We need both. And we need excellent teachers. And – dare I say it – non-academic staff too. Perhaps the challenge for institutions is getting the balance right and making everyone feel valued, and reflecting different academic activities fairly in recruitment and selection processes and promotion criteria. Not easy, when any increased emphasis on any one area seem to cause others to feel threatened.

Resourse list for academics new to social media

(This didn't happen) — "You will make sure that your research methodology links with your research questions, you snivelling little maggot!"

This week I was asked to be involved in a Research Grant application ‘bootcamp’ to talk in particular about the use of social media in pathways to impact plans, and academic blogging in general. I was quick to disclaim expertise in this area – I’ve been blogging for a while now, but I’m not an academic and I’m certainly not an expert on social media. I’m also not sure about this use of the word ‘bootcamp’. We already have ‘workshop’ and ‘surgery’ as workplace-based metaphors for types of activity, and I’m not sure we’re ready for ‘bootcamp’. So unless the event turns out to involve buzzcuts, a ten mile run, and an assault course, I’ll be asking for my money back.

But I thought I’d try to put together a list of resources and examples that I was already aware of in time for the session, and I then I wondered about ‘crowdsourcing’ (i.e. lazily ask my readers/twitter followers) some others that I might have missed. Hopefully we’ll then end up with a general list of resources that everyone can use. I’ve pasted some links below, along with a few observations of my own. Please do chip in with your thoughts, experiences, tips, and recommendations for resources.

———————————–

Things I have learnt about using social media

Blogging

You must have a clear idea about your intended audience and what you hope to achieve. Blogging for the sake of it or because it’s flavour of the month or because you think it is expected is unlikely to be sustainable or to achieve the desired results.
A good way to start is to search for people doing a similar thing and contact them asking if you can link to their blog. Everyone likes being linked to, and this is a good way to start conversations. Once established, support others in the same way.
You have to build something of a track record of posts and tweets to be credible as a consistent source of quality content – you’ve got to earn a following, and this takes time, work, and patience. And even then, might not work. Consider a ‘soft launch’ to build your track record, and then a second wave of more intensive effort to get noticed.
Posting quality comments on other people’s blogs, either in their comments section, or in a post on your blog, can be a good way to attract attention.
Illustrate blog posts with a picture (perhaps found through google images) – a lot of successful bloggers seem to do this.
Multi-author blogs and/or guest posts are a good way to share the load.
And consequently, offering guest posts or content to established blogs is a way to get noticed.
The underlying technology is now very straightforward. Anyone who is reasonably computer literate will have little trouble learning the technical skills. The editing frame where I’m writing this in looks a lot like Word, and I’ve used precisely no programming/HTML stuff – that can all be automated now.

Twitter

The technology of @s and # is fairly straightforward to pick up – find some relevant/interesting people to follow and you’ll soon pick it up, or read one of the guides below.
A good way to reach people is to get “retweets” – essentially when someone else with a bigger following forwards your message. You do this by addressing posts to them using the @ symbol
Generally the pattern of retweets seems to be when people find something interesting and it suits their message. So… the ESRC retweeted my blog post linking to their regional visit presentation when my blog post said nice things about the visit and linked to their presentation
Weird mix of personal and professional. Some twitter accounts are uniquely professional, others uniquely personal, but many seem a mixture. Some of the usual barriers seem not to apply, or apply only loosely. Care needs to be taken here.

General

Social media is potentially a huge time sink – keep in mind costs in time versus benefits gained
It can be a struggle if you’re naturally shy and attention seeking doesn’t come easily to you

Resources and further reading:

Examples of individual UoN blogs:

Patter – Pat Thomson, School of Education http://patthomson.wordpress.com/
Political Apparitions – Steven Fielding, School of Politics http://stevenfielding.com/
Registrarism – Paul Greatrix, University Registrar http://registrarism.wordpress.com/
Cash for Questions, Adam Golberg, NUBS https://socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk/

UoN Group/institutional/project blogs:

Bullets and Ballots – UoN School of Politics: http://nottspolitics.org/
China Policy Institute http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/chinapolicyinstitute/
Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility
http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/betterbusiness/
UoN blogs home http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/

Guides:

Twitter Guide – LSE Impact in Social Sciences
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2011/09/29/twitter-guide/

6 tips on blogging about research (Sarah Stewart (EdD Student, Otago University, NZ)
http://sarah-stewart.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/my-top-6-tips-for-how-to-blog-about.html

Blogging about your research – first steps (University of Warwick)
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/library/researchexchange/topics/gd0007/

Is blogging or tweeting about research papers worth it? (Melissa Terras, UCL)
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/04/19/blog-tweeting-papers-worth-it/

A gentle introduction to twitter for the apprehensive academic, (Dorothy Bishop, University of Oxford)
http://deevybee.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/gentle-introduction-to-twitter-for.html

Twitter accounts:

List of official University of Nottingham Twitter accounts
https://twitter.com/#!/UniofNottingham/uontwitteraccounts

Lists of academic twitter accounts (Curator: LSE Impact project team)
https://twitter.com/#!/LSEImpactBlog/soc-sci-academic-tweeters

https://twitter.com/#!/LSEImpactBlog/business-tweeters

https://twitter.com/#!/LSEImpactBlog/arts-academic-tweeters

https://twitter.com/#!/LSEImpactBlog/think-tanks

——————

Some of the links and choices of examples, are more than a little University of Nottingham-centric, but then this was an internal event. I’ve not checked with the authors of the various resources I’ve linked to, and taken the liberty of assuming that they won’t mind the link and recognition. But happy to remove any on request.

Any resources I’ve missed? Any more thoughts and suggestions? Please comment below….

Responding to Referees

This post is co-authored by Adam Golberg of Cash for Questions (UK), and Jonathan O’Donnell and Tseen Khoo of The Research Whisperer (Australia).

It arises out of a comment that Jonathan made about understanding and responding to referees on one of Adam’s posts about what to do if your grant application is unsuccessful. This seemed like a good topic for an article of its own, so here it is, cross-posted to our respective blogs.

A quick opening note on terminology: We use ‘referee’ or ‘assessor’ to refer to academics who read and review research grant applications, then feed their comments into the final decision-making process. Terminology varies a bit between funders, and between the UK and Australia. We’re not talking about journal referees, although some of the advice that follows may also apply there.

————————————-

There are funding schemes that offer applicants the opportunity to respond to referees’ comments. These responses are then considered alongside the assessors’ scores/comments by the funding panel. Some funders (including the Economic and Social Research Council [ESRC] in the UK) have a filtering process before this point, so if you are being asked to respond to referees’ comments, you should consider it a positive sign as not all applications get this far. Others, such as the Australian Research Council (ARC), offer you the chance to write a rejoinder regardless of the level of referees’ reports.

If the funding body offers you the option of a response, you should consider your response as one of the most important parts of the application process. A good response can draw the sting from criticisms, emphasise the positive comments, and enhance your chances of getting funding. A bad one can doom your application.

And if you submit no response at all? That can signal negative things about your project and research team that might live on beyond this grant round.

The first thing you might need to do when you get the referees’ comments about your grant application is kick the (imaginary) cat.* This is an important process. Embrace it.

When that’s out of your system, here are four strategies for putting together a persuasive response and pulling that slaved-over application across the funding finish line.

1. Attitude and tone

Be nice. Start with a brief statement thanking the anonymous referees for their careful and insightful comments, even if actually you suspect some of them are idiots who haven’t read your masterpiece properly. Think carefully about the tone of the rest of the response as well. You’re aiming for calm, measured, and appropriately assertive. There’s nothing wrong with saying that a referee is just plain wrong on a particular point, but do it calmly and politely. If you’re unhappy about a criticism or reviewer, there’s a good chance that it will take several drafts before you eliminate all the spikiness from the text. If it makes you feel better (and it might), you can write what you really think in the tone that you think it in but, whatever you do, don’t send that version! This is the version that may spontaneously combust from the deadly mixture of vitriol and pleading contained within.

Preparing a response is not about comprehensively refuting every criticism, or establishing intellectual superiority over the referees. You need to sift the comments to identify the ones that really matter. What are the criticisms (or backhanded compliments) that will harm your cause? Highlight those and answer them methodically (see below). Petty argy-bargy isn’t worth spending your time on.

2. Understanding and interpreting referees’ comments

One UK funder provides referee report templates that invite the referees to state their level of familiarity with the topic and even a little about their research background, so that the final decision-making panel can put their comments into context. This is a great idea, and we would encourage other funding agencies to embrace it.

Beyond this volunteered information (if provided), never assume you know who the referee is, or that you can infer anything else about them because you could be going way off-base with your rant against econometricians who don’t ‘get’ sociological work. If there’s one thing worse than an ad hominem response, it’s an ad hominem response aimed at the wrong target!

One exercise that you might find useful is to produce a matrix listing all of the criticisms, and indicating the referee(s) who made those objections. As these reports are produced independently, the more referees make a particular point, the more problematic it might be. This tabled information can be sorted by section (e.g. methodology, impact/dissemination plan, alternative approaches). You can then repeat the exercise with the positive comments that were made. While assimilating and processing information is a task that academics tend to be good at, it’s worth being systematic about this because it’s easy to overlook praise or attach too much weight to objections that are the most irritating.

Also, look out for, and highlight, any requests that you do a different project. Sometimes, these can be as obvious as “you should be doing Y instead”, where Y is a rather different project and probably closer to the reviewer’s own interests. These can be quite difficult criticisms to deal with, as what they are proposing may be sensible enough, but not what you want to do. In such cases, stick to your guns, be clear what you want to do, and why it’s of at least as much value as the alternative proposal.

Using the matrix that you have prepared, consider further how damaging each criticism might be in the minds of the decision makers. Using a combination of weight of opinion (positive remarks on a particular point minus criticisms) and multiplying by potential damage, you should now have a sense of which are the most serious criticisms.

Preparing a response is not a task to be attempted in isolation. You should involve other members of your team, and make full use of your research support office and senior colleagues (who are not directly involved in the application). Take advantage of assistance in interpreting the referees’ comments, and reviewing multiple drafts of your response.

Don’t read the assessor reports by themselves; you should also go back to your whole application, several times if necessary. It has probably been some time since you submitted the application, and new eyes and a bit of distance will help you to see the application as the referees may have seen it. You could pinpoint the reasons for particular criticisms, or misunderstandings that you assumed they made. While their criticisms may not be valid for the application you thought you wrote, they may very well be so for the one that you actually submitted.

3. The response

You should plan to use the available space in line with the exercise above, setting aside space for each criticism in proportion to its risk of stopping you getting funded.

Quibbles about your budgeted expenditure for hotel accommodation are insignificant compared to objections that question your entire approach, devalue your track-record, invalidate your methodology, or claim that you’re adding little that’s new to the sum of human knowledge. So, your response should:

Make it easy for the decision-makers: Be clear and concise.
Be specific when rebutting from the application. For example: “As we stated on page 24, paragraph 3…”. However, don’t lose sight of the need to create a document that can be understood in isolation as far as possible.
If possible and appropriate, introduce something that you’ve done in the time since submission to rebut a negative comment (be careful, though, as some schemes may not allow the introduction of new material).
Acknowledge any misunderstandings that arise from the application’s explanatory shortcomings or limitations of space, and be open to new clarifications.
Be grateful for the positive comments, but focus on rebutting the negative comments.

4. Be the reviewer

For the best way to really get an idea of what the response dynamic is all about in these funding rounds, consider becoming a grant referee. Once you’ve assessed a few applications and cut your teeth on a whole funding round (they can often be year-long processes), you quickly learn about the demands of the job and how regular referees ‘value’ applications.

Look out for chances to be on grant assessment panels, and say yes to invitations to review for various professional bodies or government agencies. Almost all funding schemes could do with a larger and more diverse pool of academics to act as their ‘gate-keepers’.

Finally: Remember to keep your eyes on the prize. The purpose of this response exercise is to give your project the best possible chance of getting funding. It is an inherent part of many funding rounds these days, and not only an afterthought to your application.

* The writers and their respective organisations do not, in any way, endorse the mistreatment of animals. We love cats. We don’t kick them, and neither should you. It’s just an expression. For those who’ve never met it, it means ‘to vent your frustration and powerlessness’.

I’ve disabled comments on this entry so that we can keep conversations on this article to one place – please head over to the Research Whisperer if you’d like to comment. (AG).