Careers Tagged for Early Career Researchers

is our basic Careers Information online library. Great idea  -rather like Delicious – which allows you to bookmark sites, tag them and share them.

The problem is the tagging. You can attach any tag to your resource. So the collective ‘you’ does it very inconsistently. Search under the tag  ‘Management consultancy’ and you get an incomplete  -rather thin –  list of resources. That is because other taggers used the term ‘Management consulting’ ; others used ‘consulting’ and then others ‘Strategy consulting’ or maybe ‘Strategic consulting’ .

Your tagging search tool only works if its applied consistently. Perhaps there is an argument for the system on wordpress where you have a ‘category’  and then a ‘tag’. The category framework could be objective and structured, the tagging random.

In the Early Career Rsearcher Group we set ourselves the task of devising a resource for ECR’s. It occurred to us that the effort of setting up a website was otiose. There was a prefectly good site for these folks called Vitae. Others have come on stream since  -researchgate.net, for instance.

We had a a homegrown resource -sharing site which we saw was ineffective for our PhD and postdoc clients. Variations on ‘Researcher’ generated the same problem as the ‘Consulting’ one.

There was another difficulty. Our IOs when developing Careers tagged needed to be comprehensive. A lot of researcher or scientist resources were very basic  -aimed at undergrads.

Our clients already were scientists and researchers and it was useless to refer them to resources which told them what they already knew. We wanted a higher level resource.

Our solution was to devise 2 new tags which when used together would generate this higher level  information. The tags we agreed on after much debate were: ‘Early Career Researcher’ and ‘Career Development’.

Next step was to review the resources already on CareersTagged to decide whether we think OUR clients would find them useful – and tag them with our key tags

Then we added some new resources that we used in our own guidance work. This is ongoing and we want to get 150 resources onto the system by the end of the summer. We are about half way there at the moment.

The next objective was to use two tools to add to the profile of the resource. One was to ‘tick’  approval’ We like this. The other was to add comments about why and for whom this resource was useful. Again it is early days, but it allows us to use our anecdotal observations to ‘add value’  to the resource.

Next year we want to advertise this ‘new resource to our PhD / Postdoc populations – from induction week on. I am already using careers Tagged as the main resource highlighted on my powerpoint presentations.

We do not know whether this approach will be effective. We cannot stop others using the tag ‘Early career Ressearcher and would not want to. at the same time we do not want the system to be cluttered with a lot of marginally relevant or irrelevant sites. This would harm the brand value of careerstagged in the eyes of our clients very quickly.

Our strategy is to drive clients to our own resources rather than general resources in order to consolidate the Careers Group brand as a provider of top quality career guidance and information.