Pitch training: communicating your research

The ability to communicate your research is key to success in securing funding, partners and eventually customers.

You can be the best in the works, have an amazing product/service, based on world class research and technology – it will get you absolutely nowhere unless you understand how to tell a compelling story that engages people and draw them in.

 

Effective Communication and Presentation Skills

How do you manage the meaning of your message? As well as being able to understand we need to be understood. This workshop will explore how to be effective in our communication and how to present our work with clarity, precision and purpose. We will consider audience engagement, explore models of communication, and think about what that means for us and our work. We will deal with stage management, content choice and how to present with confidence.

 

Influencing and Negotiating

In this second workshop will consider what it means to work, and communicate, with other people. How do you get your message across and make sure it is meaningful and memorable? How do you influence others and protect both of your interests? We will look at approaches, process and examples to help us along. We will learn how to negotiate in collaboration, and with compassion. And we will learn how to manage our manner, our emotions and how to create a meaningful outcome.

 

Creative Thinking for Innovative Researchers – a practical introduction

Idea innovation and evaluation is vital to being a successful researcher, in most areas of research e.g.: evaluating your next research proposal, considering the impact of your research or how your results might be commercialised or influence policy. These skills are also a key part of the successful freelancer’s toolkit. This practical and interactive session will help you to engage in various tools and processes to generate credible, innovative ideas, evaluate them and understand the next steps in making them happen.

 

The Entrepreneurial Researcher

This workshop is intended to introduce you to enterprise and entrepreneurship and invites you to undertake an analysis of your own entrepreneurial development. It will prepare you to better engage with the application and impact of your research and equip you with a better understanding of how ideas are made a reality.

The session will explore the qualities, traits and behaviours of an entrepreneurial researcher and consider the options for generating, and protecting your ideas. A person with an entrepreneurial mind set does not necessarily become a business owner; they may apply these skills in a research or other employment environment, project, or indeed to starting a new venture (and therefore becoming an entrepreneur). We will allow you to consider your own strengths, and the development needs that you may feel you require.

 

Scientific Writing

The Scientific Writing course provides an essential toolkit for producing professional and publishable scientific writing. This course consists of intensive tuition and uses good editorial practice to give participants immediate, useable methods of improving style, developing arguments, strengthening organisation and avoiding common errors, all with the aim of producing succinct and informative scientific prose.

In addition, the session encourages academic/scientific precision, good critical thinking and well-considered arguments, ultimately enabling participants to produce a more thoughtful, well-organised and effective thesis. The course also involves individual exercises, group exercises and discussion designed to enable participants to increase the quality of their writing and to increase their confidence. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, there is good advice on how to successfully communicate the science.

 

Time Management

This 2 hour workshop has been run successfully for hundreds of academics in various universities, including Newcastle for the last four years.

It starts by looking at the bigger questions of context, purpose and meaning, and then gets into the nitty gritty of academic life: dealing with conflicting priorities, carving out time to make real progress on substantial tasks, realistic approaches to planning, dealing with interruptions… and staying sane and healthy throughout.

Participative, research-based, anecdotal and engaging, it regularly receives excellent feedback, both in the short and the longer term.

 

 

 

ETN-FPI (Project number 676401) is funded under the H2020-MSCA-ITN-2015 call and is part of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions — Innovative Training Networks (ITN) funding scheme