“Online, open learning recommendations and mentoring towards Sustainable research CAReers” proposal, aka OSCAR, is a concept serving the professional development of researchers, research master students and doctoral training participants by providing personalised training on researcher mental health and career development. This training will be done by a solution using AI based learning recommendations and state-of-the-art technology for online mentoring. In order to maintain sustainable and successful academic careers, researchers and scientists need to attain interdisciplinary and transversal skills beyond their specialisation. Researchers need to drive their own careers in and outside of academia, and also manage stressful steps in their research projects while keeping up their high level of mental wellbeing and motivation to deliver high quality research output. Therefore, the OSCAR Strategic Partnership, based on the expertise of the consortium, will develop, deploy, and validate a personalised training and online mentoring service for researchers to support their career management and mental health awareness skills development. As such, the OSCAR project is built on the following central pillars: 1. The development of an online, AI driven, open learning recommendation framework and platform to support the improvement of key (transversal) skills on an individual level, taking the context of the learner into an account. 2. The development of an online mentoring program focusing on mental health of researchers, providing psychological support to understand and mitigate impact of stressful academic environments. 3. The development of an online mentoring program in career management and planning in order to support sustainable researcher careers. Consortium The Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) - coordinator - supports specialist and research communities in their learning and work processes and is actively involved in activities that put forward the full open and healthy science. The University of Siegen (USI) has expertise in projects in the domain of applied knowledge management, intelligent systems, machine learning, and software development with a strong application, educational and analytical focus. SciLink is a non-profit foundation which has expertise in the systematic approach to train transversal skills in a complex interdisciplinary and intercultural setting. SciLink organises high quality workshops for groups of researchers (both early stage and experienced researchers) active in diverse and interdisciplinary environments. MCAA is one of the largest European researcher alumni communities with its more than 15 000 members, who are high profile professionals, researchers and researchers in training. MCAA operates globally and an active member of multiple European and global transnational working groups on research policies and researcher education. Career & Life Planning (CALP) delivers coaching and training systems that enable people to improve both their personal and professional performance. CALP’s career division provides the best in class career coaching tools and techniques to ensure researchers are well equipped to develop both technical and professional skills that will ensure they are highly successful in their roles. The Instante Falante is a non-for-profit organisation with an online platform (RUMO) that provides mental health and career coaching services online. RUMO has been developing direct interventions in the field of mental health and career coaching. However, the platform has also been providing services in other fields such as psychological assessments and psychological education through webinars and workshops.
To meet the challenges above, partners in the OSCAR project wanted to offer a novel combination of online learning and mentoring to researchers across Europe. This offer includes a personalised, state of the art, Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled learning recommender (eDoer) that is complemented with expert (career and mental health) driven online mentoring. This method supports the progress of learners (researchers, doctoral researchers, and research master students) towards specific, individual career targets. According to our plan, learners could interact with the OSCAR method in two interrelated components: 1. Learners use an AI powered learning content recommender to construct their own learning trajectories based on relevant (e.g. labour market) information. As an outcome they can obtain their individual learning objectives towards specific skills and receive concrete learning content recommendations from available and relevant Open Educational Resources (OERs) and other useful learning resources as delineated in Intellectual Output 2 (IO2). 2. Learners then take these recommendations and discuss them with experienced career and mental health coaches through online mentoring. This is an important and critical step to reflect on automatic recommendations, to come up with a clear vision and a feasible strategic plan towards personalised academic training in the short term, and a career plan to be realised in the longer term (IO3, IO4). The iterative combination of AI based recommendations and online human expert based coaching is unique, and lacks established examples and models in the world of (doctoral) education. Therefore OSCAR also planned to produce a conceptual and technical framework that will detail how these two aforementioned components can work together effectively and synergistically. (IO1, IO3 and IO4) The OSCAR method was planned to be tested and evaluated through piloting (IO5) with representative European level communities of doctoral researchers (the Marie Curie Alumni Association - MCAA and the European Council for Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers - Eurodoc). During the pilots, we wanted to give special attention to female and minority (including non-European) researchers, researchers in training, and research master students. This is important as female academics and minority researchers are still grossly underrepresented in numerous disciplines, let alone the interventions targeting their skills, mental health, and well-being. We wanted to make the results publicly available as open source and open access products and publications. In addition an exploitation strategy was planned to be formulated on the basis of the pilot evaluations (IO6).
Sustainable Researcher Careers have been in the spotlight of researcher policies for almost a decade, but despite notable improvements, much is left to do. According to Eurostat, 1.88 million researchers were employed in the 28 European Union member states in 2016, which is a 32.2% increase compared to 2006 (although notably there are big differences between EU countries; providing a first rationale for a transnational approach to this subject matter). Between 2000 and 2009, the number of doctorate holders grew by 38% in ‘Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)’ countries and this number continues to grow. In stark contrast to these figures, the average gross domestic spending on research and development in the past 20 years grew only by 10% (again, with large differences between OECD countries). Overall, this has led to a continuous decline in the ratio of permanent academic positions to the number of researchers at universities, and associated increasing numbers of researchers having to rely on temporary and short-term, third-party funding. Consequently, early career researchers find themselves spending a good portion of their time competing for a limited number of job opportunities in academia, while the number of doctoral candidates and postdoctoral researchers continues to grow. As a result, on the one hand academic careers are becoming more demanding and more competitive, and on the other hand, doctoral candidates and researchers are increasingly forced to seek employment outside academia. According to a European University Association (EUA) survey in 2009, just in Europe, over 50% of doctorate holders were moving into careers outside the academic sector. In 2018, 70% of doctoral candidates, postdocs, and tenure track researchers had to seek employment outside of academia. In addition, opportunities to stay in academia, when they do arise, are often coupled with significant job insecurity due to fixed and short-term contracts and demanding tenure tracks. Clearly these developments, and the extreme demands they place on academics have a human toll as well, and are likely to be a significant determinant of what some have referred to as a mental health crisis in academia. Exacerbating the problem is the fact that universities, unions, and national governments appear either unwilling or unable to take their share of the responsibility in sustaining research careers, all too often leaving especially young (student), female, and other minority researchers in a highly vulnerable position. This being the case there is an urgent need, if not a moral imperative, to redress the current state of affairs by enhancing the employability and job security of researchers in and outside of the academic research environment. Given that higher education and research is one of the most globalised sectors of all, with high levels of researcher mobility across countries and continents and that there are considerable differences in local policies, a transnational approach to answering the question that were raised earlier is sorely needed. That is, if we want to support careers that are characterised by considerable international mobility, clearly a transnational approach is a requirement. Another strong rationale for the transnational focus of the current endeavour is the relative lack of attention that universities and national governments have been devoting to the sustainable researcher career development and mental health of particularly vulnerable researchers across Europe. It is with reason that a recent manifesto published by European work and organisational psychologists, a professional group that is ideally positioned to have an opinion on matters pertaining to career development and employee mental health, underscores the importance of recognizing the responsibilities we have towards i) placing the wellbeing of individuals at the heart of management, ii) reducing inequality, iii) breaking the silence in our communities, and iv) democratising the way in which work is organised. By leveraging cutting edge technology to the provision to researchers of tailored recommendations and mentoring, OSCAR is scalable to the European level, thereby making the most of relatively limited resources.