Reflecting on the success of the Flourish Career Development Programme

By Dr Rachel Chin, Researcher Development Project Officer for the Flourish programme

In January of this year, we launched Flourish, a pilot career development programme co-developed and tailored specifically for our research staff community. This structured nine-month programme recognised that research staff should be supported to manage their unique career landscapes. It celebrated career development as something that the University of Glasgow sees as integral to workloads rather than tangential to them. Importantly, Flourish, and the wider Talent Lab that it is part of, is an important piece of the University of Glasgow’s 2025 University Strategy. ‘World Changers Together: World Changing Glasgow’ situates colleague support and development at the forefront of its priorities. Ensuring the health and success of programmes such as Flourish will play an important role in delivering this strategy in years to come.

Now, as the Flourish pilot starts to draw to a close, I’d like to take an opportunity to look back and reflect on what the programme has achieved so far, but also where it might go next. Since the launch of the programme we have hosted more than a dozen unique workshops, events and networking sessions, which brought together more than 300 researchers from across the four Colleges of our university. We have collected, collated and analysed programme and workshop feedback comprising nearly 20,000 words. Collectively, our Eventbrite page has been visited 1,060 times.

These numbers convey a sense of the strong appetite for career support amongst the Research Staff community, but they don’t tell us the stories behind them. In addition to the personal artefacts the programme has generated for each participant (such as the Zine pictured in the image above), collecting individualised qualitative feedback about the programme and its individual components has been and will continue to be critical to its success. These thoughts have guided my thinking about Flourish through its lifetime and they are now informing how I think about where the programme might go next, beyond its pilot stage. Here is a brief preview of what I’ve found so far.

When reading through the individual stories and experiences that researchers have had on the programme and in its workshops, it was abundantly clear that Flourish is an initiative that is needed and wanted. The structured design of the programme was instrumental in creating a space for researchers to think regularly about their career development, moving beyond reactive and ad hoc approaches. In the words of one researcher:

“Flourish has made me more proactive in terms of thinking about my career development and also given me the opportunity to dedicate more time to reflective practice.”

Relatedly, a core aim of Flourish has been to support researchers to grow their confidence in navigating the overwhelming number of career routes that are available to them. As someone who has negotiated the complex landscape of opportunities and pressures that makes up the academic landscape, it was important to me to encourage researchers to approach career mapping/planning in a holistic way, emphasising the importance and validity of integrating both personal and professional factors when making career choices. Consultant Holly Prescott’s Workshop ‘Your Postdoc – What Next?’ supported researchers to think through what aspects of their jobs they found most enjoyable and rewarding. Two workshops hosted in collaboration with UofG Sport integrated discussions around health and wellbeing into thinking about career development.

In their feedback, researchers also recognised the value of thinking about career development in this way:

“The programme has also encouraged me to start taking a more proactive approach to searching for alternative careers that utilise my skills but also support my personal values.” 

“I think flourish has helped me focus on my needs rather than thinking of a career as just a job to pay the bills. It’s helped me think of making my career into one which works for me in my life.” 

Positive feedback like this has only underlined how important it is to support the career development of our Research Staff community in a way that accounts for the unique pressures that it often faces in terms of job precarity and workload pressure. But constructive suggestions have also played a critical role in shaping my thinking about how this programme might look in the future.

In particular, feedback from the Flourish cohort has made it very clear that it doesn’t want the programme to focus solely on careers outside of academia. They also want it provide development to support pursuing careers in academia. This thinking echoes our thinking for the related Pathfinder initiative, which states: “We aim to avoid reference to the false divide of academic – or – non academic careers, or plan A – vs – plan B, and instead recognise the complexity of career trajectories and expectations.” At the same time, Research Staff have proposed there is scope to further expand the holistic approach of the programme, by integrating content around mental health. Suggestions like these will be crucial not only in refining the content of the programme, but also in better signposting to available College-level development support. Likewise, they will open up more opportunities to champion the cutting-edge research that is being conducted within our research and professional community.

The value of Flourish has also been evident beyond its official cohort of 40 members. Opening up stand-alone Flourish workshops to the 1300-strong Research Staff community has underlined the strong existing demand for career development support. As a result of long waitlists on several Flourish workshops, we have been able to run two of these workshops a second time outside of the cohort model. Likewise, Flourish’s commitment to working with PIs to support the career development of their researchers has seen PIs involved in the Flourish application process as well as key events and workshops focussed on career conversations. By making sure that PIs are part of career development initiatives Flourish will play an important part in fostering a more supportive and open research culture and community, helping us to fulfil our commitment to the Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers.

The Flourish pilot programme is representative of some of the exciting work that is being done to better support Research Staff as they develop their careers within and/or without academia. It is therefore only with excitement that I look forward to seeing where it goes next.