Academic Career Network Development Guide

Funding & grants space

Research collaboration

Learned society space

Higher education space

If you are an early career or even an experienced academic, research collaboration is an important exercise you need to develop your career. There are several benefits in research collaboration. First, it facilitates quicker and faster progress on research projects. Second, collaboration helps to combine different but complementary skillsets to publish research outputs. Third, it minimises workload in undertaking research projects. Fourth, collaboration exposes you to the networks of the people you’re collaborating with. Collaboration also enhances your professional reputation on your field if your partners have well-established reputation on the field.

For many early career or experienced academics, research collaboration may start by default with PhD supervisors. This is a good start if: a) you had a fruitful working relationship with your PhD supervisors, b) your supervisors are willing to collaborate with you after attaining a PhD, and c) your supervisors are research active. However, if the above scenarios do not favour you, then you may have to find your way by developing research collaboration networks to enhance your research productivity and career development.

The first point of call for many early career academics or researchers to find collaborative relationships is the attendance of academic conferences. Attending academic conferences will expose you to experts in your field and help you to connect to those experts. However, there are many constraints with conference attendance. For instance, a conference may occur just once in year and if you are unable to attend the conference in a particular year, you may have to wait for another year. Additionally, it is not guaranteed that the experts in your field will always attend a conference you are booked to attend. Further, conference attendance may come with financial cost in terms of paying for the conference, travelling, and accommodation. While some institutions may have funding for staff members to attend conferences, others do not. If your institution does not have funding, you will have to fund the conference attendance by yourself. While conference attendance may offer opportunities for academic networking, it has its challenges.

The next point of reference for academics or researchers to find collaborative relationships is through “head-hunting”. This approach requires you to look out for the details of people in your field whose work you may be citing more frequently in your research activities. Once you have identified anyone, you could search for their contact information through Google search for their institutional profile or a search for their profile on LinkedIn. Subsequently, you may approach them through an email or any form of messaging. Sometimes, you have to be relentless with this approach because, many academics do not respond to unsolicited messages in the first instance. This is not because it is intentional but because their time is limited and their inboxes may be inundated with similar emails as well as their work-related messages. One strategy that can be useful here is to include a sample of your work and how your prospect could benefit from your work. Obviously, the main challenge here is that despite all the efforts you may put in, some of these experts may not respond to your messages.

LinkedIn is also another platform for early career academics to find collaborative relationships for academic research. On LinkedIn, you could follow the networks of the people and institutions you are connected to in order to identify people who could potentially become partners. However, just like the “head-hunting” approach, you may not get any response from these people. Additionally, the algorithms of LinkedIn enable connections by default based on your past encounters with people and organisations rather than connections based on your future career aspirations or resource needs. The challenge with LinkedIn connection is that you may be connected to people with similar background and skillsets as yours. This may hinder your development if you need someone with different skillset to unlock or enhance the productive potential of your own skillsets in research.

Finally, Careerfolio has been built as a platform for academics to find collaborative partnerships for research and other academic career activities that require collaboration. One unique feature of Careerfolio is that in creating a profile, you are able to select specific skill areas where you can help others to grow and where you will need support from others to grow. It is this functionality that enhances user visibility to those who are prospecting for collaborative engagements. This functionality also helps to easily identify people who may be relevant for your career development as result of their publication of professional resources in the skill areas where you have indicated that you will need support from others to grow. In addition to the search for collaboration through the skill area selection, Careerfolio enables you to connect to people as a partner, fellow, mentor, mentee or follower. This functionality enables users to broadcast or filter (narrowcast) messages to their connections based on the relevance of the message their connections.

As an academic or a researcher, here are some of the benefits you may derive by signing on to Careerfolio. With a profile on Careerfolio:

• Other users of the platform can easily search for you on your field, identify you by your expertise, and connect to you based on the potential complementarity between your expertise and theirs.
• You can download your CV on PDF format after entering all the relevant information or details on your profile.
• You can build a personal blog to disseminate your knowledge, expertise, and resources which may be useful for others to develop their academic or professional career.
• You may find relevant career-enhancing resources shared by other professionals or institutions, which may be useful for your studies, research, teaching, external engagement and other professional career engagements in higher education or industry.
• You can find other professionals with complementary skillsets to engage in various projects such as research.
• You can organise your connections as partners, fellows, mentors, mentees, and followers. This will help you to filter or narrowcast your messages to your connections based your relationship with them.
• You may advertise casual academic jobs for free.

These unique feature of Careerfolio makes it the “go-to” platform to organise career network relationships, particularly for academics, researchers, students and professionals in the HE sector.