Dr Katherine Howard1, Charlotte François1, Marium Khan1
1Intersect, Sydney, Australia
The research landscape in Australia is changing. Calls for improved levels of research translation, commercialisation, and collaboration with industry have increasingly become the foundation of government policy, largely driven by the Watt Review in 2015. This in turn impacts doctoral education, with one of the key findings from the 2016 Australian Council of Learned Academies (ACOLA) Review highlighting that transferable skill development in Australian universities was not as well established when compared with our international counterparts. The report also recognised that career options for HDR graduates have evolved to include more than the traditional academic roles, with many moving into both research and non-research roles in academic, business, government, and not-for-profit organisations.
In light of this focus on transferable – or employability – skills, many universities have implemented a skills training framework, and the University of South Australia (UniSA) and the University of Adelaide (UoA) are no exceptions. Through their membership with Intersect, the Enhancement of Doctoral Graduate Employability (EDGE) program at UniSA, and the Career and Research Skills Training (CaRST) program at UoA are supported in their delivery of these programs with first-class training of digital research tools and technologies. This paper will outline these two programs and demonstrate the contribution of Intersect in providing the employability skills needed by HDR graduates.
Biography:
Dr Katherine Howard is Intersect Australia’s eResearch Analyst for UniSA. She supports UniSA researchers by providing expertise in various digital tools and technologies, facilitating access to NCI’s HPC (Gadi), and coordinating Intersect’s training program for UniSA staff and students. Katherine’s background is in Information Science and she has extensive national and international experience as a researcher and academic. She has presented at conferences in Finland, Italy, France, Sweden, Greece and Thailand; given guest lectures in Estonia, Indonesia and Botswana; and has lead workshops on Digital Curation in Thailand. Katherine is also the Journal Manager of the Journal of Teaching and Learning for Graduate Employability, a fully Open Access journal hosted at Deakin University.