Vitae is an organisation set up to promote career development in both postgraduate researchers and academic staff. They have recently launched the Researcher Development Framework which is intended to help people monitor their skills and plan their personal development. At BU we will be using this framework to format the training on offer for the postgraduate research students and academic staff.
The Vitae website is an excellent resource and the organisation regularly runs free training events specifically aimed at PGRs. Upcoming events include Effective Researcher – The end is in sight aimed at students close to the completion of their PhD.
The Researcher Development Framework (RDF) is the professional development framework to realise the potential of researchers. The RDF is a tool for planning, promoting and supporting the personal, professional and career development of researchers in higher education. It was designed following interviews with many successful researchers across the sector and articulates the knowledge, behaviours and attributes of a successful researcher.
There is a planner available on the Vitae website to help you assess which stage you are at with your skills and a tutorial providing guidance on how to use the framework.
Top 10 tips from researchers on using the Researcher Development Framework (RDF):
1. You might choose to use the RDF for short term as well as long term development. The RDF can be used in planning for your long term career ambitions but also to make a feasible short term plan. It can be useful to imagine your long term ambitions in order to focus your career path however the reality of progressing through to the higher phases may be more difficult to plan. In the short term, making decisions about how to progress to the next phase or what sub-domains are most important for you will be easier. Try to be realistic when setting these short term goals.
2. Use the RDF to highlight your strengths and areas for development and how these might be used to benefit/influence your personal, professional and career development.
3. Use the RDF to highlight your applicable and transferable skills. This is important for career progression within or outside academia.
4. Prioritise those areas which are most relevant. You don’t have to try to develop in all the areas of the RDF at once. There may be some sub-domains/descriptors where there is less relevance in progressing through the phases for you.
5. Draw on experiences outside of work to evidence your capabilities.
6. Progression to the highest phase in a descriptor will not be applicable to everyone but being aware of the possibilities can aid personal and career development.
7. Talk to others to get their views about your strengths and capabilities. Your supervisor, manager, peers, family and friends are a great source of information to find out more about yourself. Talk to them about how they perceive your capabilities. By understanding how others view you, you will be able to make more informed choices about your future.
8. To move from one phase to the next why not explore attending courses. These courses may be run at a local level (within your University) or may only be run nationally or internationally so awareness of opportunities for training is important. Vitae also run a wide range of courses which address many aspects of personal and career development.
9. Some phases may only be reached through experience and practice however good self-awareness and professional development planning will aid the process.
10. Networking is likely to enable you to reach more experienced phases.

With many of the leading journals in the field of Tourism and related studies now recording rejection rates in excess of 90%, the pressure is on all of us with an interest in publishing in such journals to enhance our level of engagement with the variety of alternative research methodologies available to us and to deepen our level of knowledge of those deemed most appropriate; as well as to improve the level of rigour with which we apply them in our work! In addition to constructive criticism from panel members of the level of conceptual and theoretical engagement in many papers reviewed for RAE2008, feedback from reviewers points to methodological weaknesses in papers submitted and a sense of frustration over the a lack of rigour and an apparent unwillingness to try contemporary approaches.
Richard Brooks and Katherine Timms, Officers from CRE Operations, recently attended a training session called Total Proposal run by Aron Cronin, director of GIC limited. GIC limited is an international management and business consultancy specialising in business development and training services. 


This blog is a reflection of the BU 
This 6-month programme which commenced February 2011 has already made an impact. One afternoon per month the group of 10 postdoctoral academics, drawn from each of the research centres in the School, engage with the professoriate in learning the skills of bidding for research grants, sharing the lessons learned, as well as the challenges and the pitfalls. Whilst there are key areas addressed during the programme, essentially the action learning group is informal with the programme content arising from queries and suggestions from the group itself. The atmosphere offers an air of excitement and is informal and very informative with a buzz of spontaneity and active discussion. The testimonials provided here show just how useful the programme has been to participants as well as to the HSC professoriate.



We are delighted to offer a bespoke GrantCraft Research Workshop Day on May 11th 2011, facilitated by Dr Martin Pickard, a specialist in writing and supporting research proposals (particularly EU). Sessions will be held on grant writing skills, impact and benefit, how to write a Marie Curie proposal and the management of EU projects. You can attend as many sessions as you like throughout the day. To read more on each session and to make a booking see our
In a week’s time I will have the great pleasure to open the School of Applied Sciences’ Postgraduate Research Conference. I was delighted that I was asked to give a keynote, not only because it is a nice way of making myself known to students, since I only arrived at BU in January, but also to share some thoughts about the way we do research. Whilst universities require some original research in the final year undergraduate dissertation, and to a much greater extent in Master’s programmes, it is at PhD level where we expect the clear evidence of intellectual independence, of playful recombination of knowledge, which will allow candidates to go beyond current established borders of thought, and to push scientific progress, something that is always happening at the fringes.

Bournemouth University graduate Harriet McKay – who has since been appointed as the company’s Communications Manager – was brought in to deliver the marketing support. “When I started, the website was plain and there was absolutely no reason for customers to come back to the site,” Harriet explained. “I worked with the team at Dorset Cereals and their design agency to create a new website that would create more visits and importantly communicate their brand values. Before the University’s involvement the company had 16,000 emails on its database, now we have over 200,000. It’s been a fantastic success story.”














New interdisciplinary paper accepted for publication
Three NIHR Internships awarded at BU
Research highlighted at the UN in New York
Poverty in the UK: book launch today at BU
BU contributions to successful Global Health conference
Horizon Europe Cluster 3 (Civil Security for Society) 2026 Calls Now Open
MSCA Doctoral Networks 2026 Call Information Webinar
ESRC Festival of Social Science 2026: Application Deadline Extended to Thursday 25 June 2026
Reminder: Register for the ESRC Festival of Social Science 2026 Information Session
ECR Funding Open Call: Research Culture & Community Grant – Apply now
ERC Advanced Grant 2025 Webinar
Update on UKRO services
European research project exploring use of ‘virtual twins’ to better manage metabolic associated fatty liver disease