A brighter picture of professional development at the University of Glasgow
We take a closer look at how the Inkpath platform has helped administrate and coordinate a complex, multiple department environment at one of the UK’s leading seats of higher education.
The University of Glasgow is a world-leading research-intensive institution, with one of the broadest research bases in the UK. With a wide range of disciplines reflected in its academic community it produces research of global and national importance.
An ecology of different specialist services offers academic and professional development to students and researchers alike. Development for postgraduate researchers and research staff includes a rich range of opportunities, such as inductions, workshops, mentoring, writing retreats, peer networks, conferences, teaching and leadership development, internships and more.
One of these services is the Research Culture and Researcher Development (RC&RD) portfolio: a multi-disciplinary team that works to ensure that every researcher is supported to be at their best, as part of an engaging, fair, and collegial culture in which people help each other to succeed, and to make informed active choices about their development and their careers. RC&RD have been a lead partner in piloting the Inkpath platform at Glasgow.
Empowering researchers to take charge of their own development
As the ecology of support at Glasgow has grown, so too have the challenges of promoting, booking, tracking, and evaluating researcher development. From the administrative end, having multiple training management systems used by different services was duplicating effort. It was difficult to get engagement data, and it prevented the university from offering shared training across different groups of researchers. From the user end, a 2022 consultation showed that researchers found the booking systems difficult, disagreeable, and off-putting to use.
As well as a more user-friendly system for managing events, the RC&RD team were looking for a purpose-built professional development platform that would empower researchers to take charge of their own development and enable them to have agency to make informed and active choices about their professional development.
The team were also seeking a platform that would accommodate the multiple other specialist development teams at the University, providing a single view of the training offering across the institution. After scoping out solutions, Inkpath seemed to uniquely address these specific service improvements, and a pilot launched in October 2023.
All the services that have been involved in the Inkpath pilot speak highly of the transformational improvement the platform has brought. From the user end, particular benefits have included improved visibility of provision, leading to better researcher engagement, and researchers taking more agency over their professional development. From the service provider end, quick access to data, and vast time-savings on manual processing have been a step-change in the University’s ability to offer a thriving and diverse development offer.
Improving visibility and opportunity
Even at pilot stage, Inkpath already brings together many of the training and career development opportunities from across the institution, and the University hopes to bring more specialist services on board going forward.
Inkpath has made it possible for events to be open to all, not siloed onto different platforms. With multiple opportunities in one place, researchers are better able to see what opportunities are available and to use this information to strategically plan their development.
This visibility goes in multiple directions. Inkpath puts opportunities on users’ radar: this has been particularly valuable for reaching new research staff who were previously difficult to engage. It also provides real-time feedback from researchers to providers about demand (based on waiting lists) and satisfaction (based on event rating).
This enables RC&RD and other services to create and adjust training provision that aligns with and meets the goals of its users. Additionally, Inkpath has significantly improved peer-to-peer visibility across different services. Being able to mutually see provision has enabled services to have active discussion about the frequency, relevance, gaps, and needs for development offers across the University.
Bucking the sector-wide drop in engagement
Inkpath has rapidly become a seamless part of the University’s researcher development training provision. Within the first year more than 4,500 University of Glasgow postgraduate and staff researchers were already enrolled on the platform.
Inkpath has also helped Glasgow to buck a sector-wide drop in engagement with researcher development. For example, there has been an up-tick from 40% to 52% of Postgraduate Researchers attending at least one optional training since the introduction of the platform, and researchers logging an average of 21.5 hours of development.
Of course, training workshops are only a small part of the wide range of activities that develop researchers and prepare them for careers both within and beyond academia. The University of Glasgow is a signatory to the Researcher Development Concordat which commits to all researchers engaging in 10-days per year of professional and personal development.
A primary benefit of Inkpath is that it enables researchers to take control of planning and logging a complete record of this development journey. It empowers researchers to have agency in actively building their professional profile, thinking strategically about what activities will have the greatest impact on their skills and experience.
The benefits of Inkpath are not only for the researchers: the platform has also been a valued boost to training and development teams themselves. Routine and annual evaluation of development frameworks was previously a time-intensive and imprecise process. Spreadsheets from different platforms were manually processed and cross-referenced to understand the value and impact of the training and development on offer. Inkpath’s standard inbuilt reporting dashboards, present all of this data at a glance.
This quick and easy mechanism supports local training evaluation where team administrators are easily able to see outputs from their own events. Indeed Inkpath has enabled smaller development teams to collect statistically representative satisfaction data for the first time.
It additionally supports institution-wide planning across the ecology, as super-administrators, for example in RC&RD, are able to map engagement and feedback across all provision. Inkpath have been highly responsive partners, who rapidly created bespoke dashboards which enable different development teams to get the data they need, when they need it.
Perhaps the most significant impact of the Inkpath pilot has been for the administrative staff who previously undertook the manual processes of managing events. Administrators report that automating the bookings, attendance, and information management for an average workshop has slashed the time this takes from around four to just one hour per event.
During the 9-month pilot, 681 events were managed through Inkpath, making a time saving of 2043 work hours, or 58 weeks of work. This has been a powerful incentive for teams to offer more opportunities to researchers, knowing that the event management will be smooth and easy.
Coordinating a complex, multiple department environment
Dr Rachel Lyon, the RC&RD Inkpath Coordinator, attests to how consistently impressed RC&RD has been with the working relationship between the University and the Inkpath team. They have been quick and reflexive in making key changes to how the platform operates (for example around the wording of standard emails) to meet institutional needs, and Glasgow has benefitted from being part of the Inkpath Pioneers group. Lyon notes:
‘We’re using Inkpath to coordinate a complex, multiple department environment. Today we have an effective and user-friendly platform that allows our users to actively engage with us and empowers them to take ownership of their professional development,’ she says. ‘The platform has also provided us with insights into what other departments are offering in terms of training and development, helping us to paint a much brighter picture of our full training provision across the University.
‘The Inkpath team listened to our requirements and understood deeply what we were trying to achieve. We asked: how can we build something together that would really improve our researchers’ experience? We now have a platform which offers this and has made a huge difference to our understanding of who our researchers are and what they need,’ Lyon added.
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Images: Johnny Briggs / Vishnu Prasad
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