Framing Researcher Development

By Dr Joanna Royle, Researcher Development Manager

For those of us working in Researcher Development, Vitae’s Researcher Development Framework (RDF) is our lodestar. Originally built in 2010 though sector-wide consultation, it helped give shape to our emerging discipline and its practices. It was an essential direction-setting tool at the end of the 2003-2011 national ‘Roberts’ SET for Success funding, when UKHE institutions had to make informed decisions on internally resourcing researcher development. While it isn’t the only possible approach, the RDF gives a shared language for the skills and aptitudes of researcher careers, and remains the go-to tool for shaping development needs analyses and programme designs.

The only hiccup is that the 2010 RDF presented a pretty intense hierarchical taxonomy. Its four quadrants, twelve sub-domains, and 63 descriptors, across five career stages, made it wonderfully comprehensive, but researchers often found it overwhelming. It also didn’t map especially intuitively to professional milestones such as promotions or fellowship applications, or to institutional commitments like the Researcher Concordat. Recognising how the research landscape had changed over the last fifteen years, with stronger emphasis on impact, innovation, team-research, and interdisciplinarity, Vitae decided it was time for a refresh. And what an incredible refresh it has been.

What has changed?

First and foremost: the structure. The new 2025 RDF (pictured above) has a much simpler, concentric, architecture covering the Researcher, Research, and Research Communities. The individual researcher sits at the centre, surrounded first by the practice of research and then by the wider communities in and through which research takes place. In my opinion this is not only more intuitive: it also better reflects contemporary research practice. Where the 2010 Framework was entirely about you as a researcher, and your skillset, the new Framework recognises that good research depends as much on teams, networks, and wider collaborations as on individual scholarship. The 2025 iteration also simplifies the indicative career stages from five to four, with a stronger emphasis on cross-sector career mobility, making it easier to use across a professional lifecycle.

This is not to say that the new version is without issues. Reducing the number of skills from 63 to 31 is good for usability, but inevitably some granularity has been lost. Perhaps the most visible gap is researcher wellbeing. Dropping the ‘work-life balance’ descriptor from the original Framework feels like a significant omission in a landscape where overwork, mental health issues, and burnout are common. And while the ‘reputation and esteem’ descriptor was ripe for a refresh, I am not convinced this important part of researcher practice is fully captured within the new Framework.  Nevertheless, despite these criticisms, I have massive admiration for the careful work done to translate the complexity of being a researcher into this significantly updated model.

Making a start with the new RDF at Glasgow

The new RDF launched last summer, and like many HEIs, the University of Glasgow chose not to rush implementation, instead taking an academic year to become familiar with it. The Research Culture and Researcher Development Team is now moving to the new framework and encouraging colleagues across the University to do the same. As a practical first step we have built the new RDF into Inkpath. Inkpath is the platform that Glasgow researchers generally use to book and record development activity, with every activity tagged to one or more RDF skills. Those skills have now been updated from 2010 to the 2025 Framework, which will be used from academic year 2026-27.

Of course, development means much more than attending courses, and Inkpath enables researchers to self-capture their wider activities such as conference presentations, knowledge exchange, teaching, mentoring, policy work, demonstrating, learning through networks, specialist training etc. By adding activities from both within and beyond the University, and tagging them to the RDF skills, Inkpath offers researchers a single, downloadable, transferable record of their professional development, that can support annual review meetings, career planning, mentoring conversations and more.

Support from supervisors and PIs

Researchers should be reflecting on and planning their training and development in conversation with their supervisors, PIs or managers. Both the Researcher Development Concordat and the UKRI Statement of Expectations for Doctoral Training commit universities to providing high-quality professional and career development opportunities, and commit Research Staff, PGRs and their Supervisors and Managers to actively engaging in their own development. At the University of Glasgow, like many if not all others, PGRs and Research Staff are encouraged to undertake around ten days of development (pro-rata) per year.

These development conversations can sometimes feel awkward, but help is at hand as Dr Stephanie Zihms at Glasgow Caledonian University has generously shared  an excellent RDF excel planner with the sector, which supervisors and researchers can use together.

For research professionals who organise development activities

If you organise development activities, you probably already map them to the original RDF domains of Knowledge and Intellectual Abilities; Personal Effectiveness; Research Governance and Organisation; and Engagement, Influence and Impact. In the short-term think of the new framework as a reorganisation rather than replacement. A session on project management that previously sat under search Governance and Organisation (C.2.2) now sits in Research (3.2) One on time management that was previously Personal Effectiveness (B.2.3) is now Researcher (2.3) and so on. Inevitably, the mapping is not exact, and Vitae have provided a mapping tool to support the transition. 

Closing thoughts

The RDF, by its nature, describes the development of individual researchers. It is important to acknowledge that many of the challenges researchers face today are structural rather than individual, and the RDF should not be mis-interpreted as a tool for turning those widespread challenges into matters of individual resilience. That said, RDF 2025 is excellent at what it sets out to do. It is a thoughtful evolution of the 2010 framework, more intuitive, with greater value placed on researchers not simply as generators of knowledge, but as contributors to teams, collaborations and cultures.

We have a lot of work to do to build familiarity with the new Framework. Our hope is that researchers, their supervisors and PIs, and the research professionals who enable their work will, in time, all be conversant with it, and know how to use it to inform opportunities for professional growth. This blogpost is a small start, and we would warmly welcome suggestions for next steps on embedding it at Glasgow.