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Earma 2024: Association director hopeful for continued inclusion in European Research Area policy priorities
There is “very positive” support among the EU member states for research management and administration at present, an event for the profession has heard.
At the annual conference of the European Association of Research Managers and Administrators on 24 April, Earma managing director Nik Claesen (pictured centre) provided an update on efforts to develop the profession as part of the European Research Area initiative for raising standards across research.
Among 18 ERA priority actions for 2022-24, action 17 is focused on developing research management, and Claesen said it has garnered a lot of support, following initial hesitancy.
‘Very valuable’
“It’s being appreciated as a very valuable action that is working well, that is having impact, so in that sense it’s being seen as very positive,” he said, adding that the support is “only growing”.
Initially, the member states questioned whether they had capacity to support the research management action, and whether it was important enough, he said, but now “it’s moving in a very good direction”.
Those involved in shaping the ERA are currently considering the next set of priorities for 2025-27, and a follow-up action on research management is among them.
Claesen said it was very difficult to say at present what the concrete aims would be, but that it would be “along the lines” of the current action 17.
‘Concrete deliverables’
A day later, Stijn Delauré, a European Commission policy officer who has worked on the ERA and is currently on secondment to the January to June Belgian presidency of the Council of the EU member states, talked about the same topic.
A former research manager himself, Delauré said that initially there was “a kind of ignorance” at national level about the value of research management, but also that the community was “too inward-looking”. This changed thanks to the lobbying of Earma, he said.
The proposal for a research management action for the next ERA agenda, which was co-written by Earma, has been receiving “very positive” feedback so far, Delauré said.
“It’s a very concrete action, with concrete deliverables, getting somewhere in a certain timeframe, clear and convincing,” he said.
“It’s actually about harvesting what has been put on the rails in the current policy agenda: awareness-raising, implementation of a careers and competence framework, an alignment platform with curricula and tools, a new programme for mobility and peer-to-peer learning of research managers and administrators, and at a later stage also links with industrial research managers.”
The RM Roadmap project being led by Earma and the linked Cardea project are working on the unified careers and competence framework. The Commission would like this to be adopted in the summer, according to Delauré, who urged attendees to contribute to the surveys these projects are carrying out.
Initial survey results
Surveys for the RM Roadmap project have garnered thousands of partial or full responses so far, which were summarised by other speakers at the conference, including Virág Zsár (pictured second from right), a senior grant adviser based in Hungary, and Cristina Oliveira (pictured right), an executive research manager based in Portugal.
So far, 70 per cent of research managers responding to one survey have been women and 90 per cent have had either a master’s degree or a PhD, Zsár said. In a reported improvement on previous surveys, 75 per cent of research manager respondents said they were on permanent contracts.
But while many research managers reported working extra hours outside of their employment conditions, only 25 per cent said they were recognised for this.