What do Secondments mean to you?

Welcome to the ARMA Secondments Project!

Welcome to ARMA’s new Secondments Project where we aim to raise the profile of secondments!

Secondments are a really great way of helping develop your career, allowing you to evidence experience of working in a different organisation, usually delivering a great project at the same time. And all that without giving up your day job!

For the host organisation, it’s an excellent way to get someone with the right knowledge and skills in to deliver that all-important project.

And we mustn’t forget the secondee’s employer either. Secondments are a creative way of investing in your people. They will almost certainly deliver an excellent project while they’re on secondment, returning to you rejuvenated with new knowledge and skills, which your department can then benefit from.

This project is all about highlighting the profile and value of secondments, confronting the myths and legends, and just making it easier to go down the secondments route!

Over the next 12 months or so, follow our progress as we gently nudge Secondments into the limelight!

 

So, just what is a secondment?

A secondment takes place when an employee (or group of employees) is temporarily assigned to work for another organisation or a different part of their employer. Secondments are part of the modern workplace. As flatter management structures become more usual, traditional promotion opportunities through a series of line management roles are limited. Secondments offer valuable career development opportunities and are increasingly used as part of talent management programmes. They also help organisations to be agile and flexible byexpanding capability, skills and knowledge across the business.

As discussed, secondments can be internal (i.e. within an organisation) or external (i.e. between organisations). External secondments require a legal agreement between an employer and a host organisation to cover X, Y and Z. 

Secondments are short term arrangements in terms of months and are rarely seen for more than a year. It is possible for secondments to be part time (PT) i.e. for a PT employee to be seconded PT or for a full time (FT) employee to be seconded to a host organisation PT but continue to work for their employer PT.

For further information, check out Secondments: A Review of current Research, A Background Paper for IES Research Network Members by Rob Barkworth

 

Check out our blog posts:

• Stepping outside of my Comfort Zone by Sophie Crouchman

• Secondments Galore! by Pilar Pousada Soliño

• An opportunity to challenge myself by Joanne Mills

• Welcome to the ARMA Secondments Project by Mark Taylor

 

Secondment Survey Results

Secondments can be an important tool in staff development and resource management but can be difficult to arrange and manage. In the spring, we ran a survey to collect your your views on this topic. If you took part in the survey, thank you so much!

View the results from the Survey.

 

ARMA Working Group on Secondments – Final Report.

The working group met online at regular intervals between 2021 to 2023. Notable activities have included a broad online survey, advertised to the ARMA, NIHR and AMRC communities; a number of blog posts hosted on a specific ARMA webpage (and disseminated through sites such as LinkedIn) and two online roundtables for senior leadership of our community. All work has been designed to highlight the advantages of secondments to the research management and administration ecosystem as well as seek out opinion around what is necessary to encourage and promote its adoption. This is the final report. 

Final Report

 

Check out our Terms of Reference

Meet the Project Working Group

Join the Conversation! Use #researchmanagementsecondments on Twitter and LinkedIn and share your thoughts!

Further Information

If you’d like to know more about the ARMA Secondments Project, or think you may be able to help us, please send us an email at enquiries@arma.ac.uk. We’d love to hear from you!