Where next for the career breaks survey?

Feedback, insights and reflections from #ARMA2016

We were everywhere at the recent 2016 ARMA UK annual conference. What with the rebranding and the initial findings of the career breaks survey, we had a lot to talk to you about.

If you were there, you may have seen our stand (the only stand selling something for free!), chatted to us about what we do, and signed up to receive the e-book of our careers break survey report while you were there.

You may have seen our stunning poster, designed and produced by Research Media, who have brought the survey findings to life with their wonderful images and infographics.

Or you may have been lucky enough to attend our workshop session on ‘The Long Apprenticeship’ which asked our audience to engage with and reflect upon the initial findings of the academic career breaks survey. As Vicky Williams from Research Media said, the data was literally hot off the press and got everybody talking.

I had only ever heard of ARMA recently but here I was, co-presenting a poster and workshop, which led to some fascinating conversations about your experiences of career breaks in academia. The research was really well received across the wide range of representatives at the conference, and everyone had a story to tell.

So what next for the career breaks survey? Well, we certainly have more work to do. Our keen and insightful audience at the presentation session gave us plenty of ideas – fresh ways to analyse the data, more literature to seek out and explore, and top tips from the experts at Daphne Jackson Trust and Athena Swan. The consensus was that we must keep going. We had over 5000 respondents after all, and there is so much rich data yet to consider.

So we will spend the summer honing our data analysis techniques, and tinkering with Attributes and Nodes in NVivo, and come up with something equally as captivating in the autumn. Just in time for the 2016 Vitae Researcher Development International Conference in Manchester in fact! Come and find us and we can continue the story together.

The career breaks survey wouldn’t exist without our collaboration with Research Media, so we want to thank them for their expertise and continued support. If you want to know more, you can download the e-book with initial survey findings.

Main image courtesy of Pixabay.