Training Package 3. Transferable skills
Additionally, to courses on presentation skills, scientific writing and management offered in Training Package 1, ESRs will have other courses on transferable skills distributed throughout the remaining PhD period. This training will consist of obligatory courses for all ESRs and personalized training programs based on specific needs for each ESR. Courses on IP, patenting and licensing, grant writing, introduction to teaching, leadership courses, entrepreneurship courses and training for job interviews will be obligatory for all ESRs. Additionally, based on a personal development plan that will be revisited on a yearly basis, ESRs will have a possibility to choose useful courses from a wide menu of courses in transferable skills offered by ULiège (R&D department in particularly). These courses are offered every academic year. The catalogue of courses is available here. All ESRs will be encouraged to train and enhance acquired skills by organizing and participating in symposia, workshops, regular education curriculums, supervision of Master students and outreach activities.
IP, patenting and licensing (Duration - 1 day)
IP and patenting are areas in which ESRs often lack essential knowledge. However, these topics are of key importance to industry and becoming of more importance to academic researchers starting from the early career stages. This course will provide ESRs with an overall understanding of intellectual property rights including but not limited to patents, main steps of patenting and licensing strategy.
Grant and proposal writing (Duration - 0.5 day)
This workshop is a 4-hour session that provides an intensive introduction to grant writing. The main steps of proposal writing and common structure of the grants will be explained. The ESRs receive an overview of the main grants distributing organisations in Belgium and in Europe. In addition, the ESRs will benefit from the in-house GIGA Grants “GoGetERCs” initiative. The GoGetERCs meetings are open seminar forums aimed at assisting researchers to develop competitive research proposals, mainly targeting prestigious grants such as the European Research Council (ERC) program, Horizon 2020 calls, and other similar funding instruments. During these meetings, a speaker presents the ideas for a research project proposal and the project is critically assessed and the feedback is given by the colleagues.
Communicating science (course of communication)
This course will teach ESR the principles of journalistic nonfiction and communicating of scientific concepts and discoveries to the general public. ESRs will be explained how to make the scientist’s work more relatable, memorable and understandable but still accurately described. This course will be connected to a hands-on experience. The course will be taught synchronised with GIGA conferences. Each month, an internationally renowned researcher is invited to GIGA to present their research to a broader scientific community. After each talk, the ESRs will, in turn, be asked to write a “news and views” item about the speaker and his/her research topic. Feedback on the text will be given by a professional editor and common style and grammatical mistakes will be discussed within the groups. The final text will be published on the GIGA Doctoral School website and will serve to promote the School and GIGA.
