Calling all early career research staff at Kent!  You told us that “Research staff fall through the cracks”.  Help us stop this from happening in the future.  Have your say in the Careers in Research Online Survey (CROS) from 1 May 2019.

CROS runs nationally every two years for early career research staff. CROS is your chance to tell Kent about your views and experiences. Key benefits of CROS are:

• The information you provide will be used to inform policy and practice around employment, management and researcher development: this should benefit not only you, but also have long-lasting impact for future researchers.
• A clearer picture of Kent’s progress towards implementing the principles of the Concordat to support Researchers; and on how we are meeting our Athena Swan goals, to continue to improve our gender equality support for early career research staff.
• A good response rate and national benchmarking will provide leverage for future changes at Kent.

CROS is anonymous. It is managed by Vitae and hosted on Online Surveys, a secure web environment.

Is the survey targeted at you? Vitae’s definition of early career research staff is:

“Researchers are […] individuals whose primary responsibility is to conduct research and who are employed for this purpose. It is recognised that this broad category of staffing covers a wide range of staff with different disciplinary backgrounds, levels of training, experience and responsibility, types of contract (fixed or open-ended, full- or part-time), and different career expectations and intentions.  However, […] there are likely to be early career staff who may be sustaining their research activity through a series of teaching or other professional contracts.” (2015)

If you have any queries about the survey, contact Dr Jo Collins (Postgraduate Development Advisor), j.p.collins@kent.ac.uk.

CROS closes on 31 May.2019.