Educational Reflections and Future Focus
This article is part of the Annual Report 2019
The future focus of the DDA Educational Activities and Talent Development is based on participant evaluations and feedback and suggestions from the DDA committees and boards in 2019. These indicate the following main focus points: (i) To keep the variety of topics and research disciplines included in each activity; (ii) to keep and allocate even more time for networking activities and include various interactive learning methods; (iii) to continue to include a high rate of international speakers, but also include even more junior researchers as speakers; (iv) to adopt a more strategic approach for collaborations with international research organisations; and (v) to find ways to bridge the gap between the life sciences industry and junior researchers from academia and hospitals.
Overall, the bottom-up approach involving DDA faculty members and members of the DDA committees and boards to give suggestions for the DDA Educational Activities and Talent Development programme has prompted the endorsement from the scientific environment and is a reason for the high attendance of the 2019 activities, with the majority of seats taken up at each activity. The DDA will therefore continue to adopt this approach in 2020.
The participant evaluations support the need for including transferable skills courses. Next year’s Educational Activities and Talent Development programme will continue to include a high variety of topics of the courses and therefore also transferable skills courses. The DDA acknowledges the importance for the junior researchers to develop skills within adaptability, organisation, teamwork, leadership and presentation in their current or future job positions. Feedback from participants attending the presentation course Presenting Powerfully offered by the DDA in 2019 clearly demonstrated an increased awareness of a new ability to be clearer, more concise and more effective when communicating projects and results. Causality is hard to prove, but there have been examples of junior researchers attending the courses who immediately after won prizes for best poster presentations at national and international conferences.
Successful researchers also need leadership skills for leading projects, disciplines or people. The DDA received excellent feedback from participant participating in the Postdoc Research Leadership Course. Based on this feedback and suggestions from the International Advisory Board, the DDA will design a specific research leadership programme: The DDA Research Leaders Development Programme for highly motivated junior researchers to develop the needed skills and mind-set to become the research leaders of tomorrow. This programme will be launched in 2020.
An encouraging observation is the consistent feedback from participants in 2019 on how valued the allocated space and time for networking is. In 2020, each educational activity will continue to have a strong platform for networking through both unstructured and structured activities. The ambition is to further promote the DDA’s status as a national hub facilitating interdisciplinary research between researchers from academia, hospitals and the life sciences industry.
A seal of approval of the DDA educational activities is also the strategic approach of using a high percentage of scientific experts from abroad as speakers. Their contributions through lectures provide new perspectives and visions within the specific topic of the individual activities and the DDA’s ambition is therefore to continue this approach. A new focus point will be to involve more junior researchers (postdocs) as speakers or workshop instructors at some of the PhD courses. In 2019, the DDA has included junior researchers in tandem talks (a mix of senior and junior researcher lectures) and as workshop instructors.
The DDA already has an existing excellent collaboration with international research institutions in Europe and North America. The ambition is to identify and select additional educational partners from prestigious international research institutions with research expertise complementing the existing research expertise in Denmark.
Finally, it should be emphasised that the DDA has an unresolved potential in building a closer collaboration with the life sciences industry. The potential lies in highlighting the career opportunities for shifting from employment at a university to a position in a life sciences company and to include talks and presentations from representatives from the life sciences industry.
In conclusion, the DDA has further optimised the Educational Activities and Talent Development programme in 2019 based on feedback and suggestions from participant evaluations and suggestions from the DDA committees and boards. In 2020, the DDA will retain its strategic focus, as described above, but also attach special attention to the above-mentioned focus points.