How can ARMA share best practice about professional development?

By Ushma Gudka, Head of Post Award at Brunel University London and member of ARMA’s Professional Development Committee

As part of the ARMA Professional Development Committee, I was asked to look at how we can share best practice about professional development. Every time I get started on this, I go down rabbit holes! What is best practice? Who decides? Should it be able to apply to everyone or can it be just for a few?

As our Committee started looking at other areas of the strategy, including reviewing the professional development framework, I began to question what should come first (think chicken and egg here); should we wait for the framework and then find best practice to complement it or should we find the best practice and help to feed into the framework? In the end, we decided that they should work alongside each other – so I’m going to get the conversation started!

As research and research-related professionals we are often attempting to bring about change to make things better. Sometimes the changes we want to make are big and other times they are small. As we approach the end of a year and the beginning of the next, many of us will be preparing for our annual ‘professional development’ meetings with our line managers, or are developing departmental or sectional ‘plans’ for the forthcoming year and we might like to access resources and information that can help us on our journey.

One of the things that I have learned working in post-award research is that nearly every institution has its research structures set up differently. This is often an evolutionary thing that grows out of institutional academic and professional structures, the ‘systems’ and processes that are in place, the strategy (or not), KPIs and other drivers and many other things have an impact on how research support is set up in an institution. This can mean developing a ‘one size fits all’ solution simply isn’t possible. So, when we want to create change – we often have to find wade through examples that can suit a variety of situations and try to find one that suits our exact situation.

Questions I always ask are:

• Why am I doing this?
• How will we do it?
• What resources do I need?
• Has it been done before? If so, who, when, why and did it work?
• How much will it cost – not just cash, but time, policies and other?
• What are the unintended outcomes?
• Who are the stakeholders that this change will impact? Can they help? How will they receive the change?

These are all really important questions but I think the key question for this article is: Has it been done before? If so, who, when, why and did it work? It is very rare that you are the first person that wants to make the change. Surely, someone has done it before and maybe, just maybe, I can use that information for my change.

So, when I want to learn something new – where can I look? Well, there are resources out there:

1. The internet, social media: Twitter (now X)
2. Conferences
3. Our own networks
4. ‘Jo’ who introduced something at Institution X (except Jo is no longer at University X!)
5. Articles in The Protagonist
6. Special Interest Group (SIG) Mailing lists
7. ARMA Training and Development courses

These are just a few of the places that I would consider looking to find my solution. In fact, I have used all of these at some stage in my career and have found them all to be useful. What I would really like to do is create a knowledge base whereby some of these resources can be put in one place so that I have somewhere to start my search.

This is where I believe ARMA can provide some really helpful solutions to get us started.

Firstly, a lot of information already exists – within ARMA there is the information that is created and shared by RMAs for RMAs. We find this at conferences, within publications like The Protagonist and through our amazing special interest groups. 

Every ARMA Conference has amazing sessions and posters where members share really relevant information. I am hoping that we will be able to access some of this historical information so that it can be shared more widely following the conference without compromising the benefits of the overall conference experience. We also have The Protagonist (login required), with its many researched articles that we are hoping be able to categorise in more detail to help us to find things. The SIG members share knowledge with one other – often when an ‘issue’ arises and this information can be so useful to others in the community.

So with all these resources ‘out there’, it would be great to make them accessible to the members of ARMA. One way to do this relatively quickly is to start using the ARMA website. Over the coming months ARMA is going to work on the SIG web pages to link some of this available information as a first exercise. Part of the challenge is finding the resources and then making them ‘searchable’. We’ll also need to look at how easy that will be based on the current resources (website etc) that is available. We may also be able to identify other resources external to ARMA that members would find useful: relevant peer networks; regional groups etc and other relevant policy documents.

Secondly, as part of the ARMA community, I believe we can support each other too by sharing with others what we know. We often do wonderful things but are often modest about communicating the work that you have done.  I am hoping that we can address this by creating short, informal blog posts that will become part of a blog series where we can highlight examples of ‘best practice’ in the area of professional development (and wider topics within RMA) where we can share examples of good/best practice across the ARMA community.

What can you do?

• Engage actively within a SIG – share your experiences when someone asks and ask your own questions – it’s unlikely to be a silly and someone may be facing the same challenges.
• Get in contact at enquiries@arma.ac.uk and tell us about your ‘best practice’ for professional development and help us to share more information in blog posts like this one.

ARMA is looking to set up a new working group to lead this activity. Watch this space for more information and consider putting yourself forward.