Development

As a postdoc, you get many opportunities to develop yourself and your career. Your position involves learning constantly about your research area and building both your subject-specific skills and your transferable skills.

Transferable skills (sometimes referred to as "soft" skills) are, as their name indicate, skills that are valued and can be applied in other roles and sectors. You often don't realise you have them and forget to develop them! They include communication, team work, leadership, management etc.

These skills are the ones that you will need the most to progress in your career, so don't neglect them.

There are two main ways to develop your skills: learn and do. You can learn by attending lectures, workshops, online training and generally raising your awareness of a specific topic. This is helpful and a good place to start, but it isn't sufficient. The most important is to take on opportunities to actually use these skills and develop them in a concrete manner. In addition to improve yourself via trial and error, "doing" enables you to build real-life experience that you can showcase on your CV to demonstrate your skills.

Do not forget that developing yourself is part of your role and that you are entitled to 10 days per year for activities related to your career development.