During the first stage of the project, partners have deepened their understanding of the specific skills needed on the labour market by organising regional workshops with non-academic stakeholders in four different European countries. Each workshop focused on a different career sector chosen to represent the crucial challenges of the 21st century. These meetings provided state-of-the-art knowledge that served as a base to design recommended curricula and pilot courses, and ensure that the end-user needs are met. They also aimed at involving non-academic stakeholders in the project and strengthening the project’s network.
In the second period, the project has released the DocEnhance Platform, providing freely accessible online resources for doctoral education, including three transferable courses on data stewardship, career management and entrepreneurship, and supervision. The platform builds on the existing PhD Hub platform, and is enhanced with ESCO classification, to find matching transferable skills courses and to link the available courses to relevant offers on the PhD Hub.
Over the last two decades, as the employment landscape for doctoral graduates has shifted, the need for their training in transferable skills has become crucial for them to transfer their knowledge to non-academic settings. The project has developed and piloted three courses for doctoral education:
• Data Stewardship presents the theory and concepts of data management and teaches how to collect, analyse, and manage research data.
• Career Management & Entrepreneurship helps graduates to reflect upon their personal strengths, weaknesses and life goals, develop critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, communication and self-management skills, and act upon entrepreneurial ideas and opportunities and transform them into value.
• Supervision provides PhD supervisors with resources to identify and embed pedagogical, practical and up-to-date skills, and to gain knowledge of a variety of supervision practices from the non-academic sector.
This career-oriented curriculum aims to address the future needs and competences of researchers. Aligned to the principles of open access and innovation, each of the DocEnhance courses is structured upon three interlinking learning modules:
• The first open education module consists of online resources: lectures, tools and case studies. A set of short videos that can also be used for self-learning.
• The second interdisciplinarity module consists of local group work, with exercises and discussion topics.
• The third mobility module is a regional assignment with potential employers.
The courses have been designed as open educational resources and can easily be adapted and integrated to existing curricula and Moodle platforms.
Summary of Key Exploitable Results, available through the Horizon Results Platform
• The DocEnhance Platform, evaluated and validated by internal and external stakeholders,
• The DocEnhance courses, evaluated and validated by course participants and course providers,
• The DocEnhance career-tracking survey, piloted within 9 European universities,
• A good practice recommendation for implementation of career-tracking survey of doctorate holders (will be officially published as a CWA on the CEN homepage in mid-March),
• The DocEnhance course concept, proved by 3 pilot courses that were each piloted twice at minimum two universities.
