The final report is now live and can be found here: Talent Commission Report

The TALENT Commission, has gathered new strategic insights into the UK’s technical workforce in higher education and research.

The TALENT Commission addresses themes around: Contributions to UK higher education and research, policy landscape, characteristics and trends of the workforce, funding technical roles, career pathway, progression, CPD, succession and sustainability, perception, recognition and representation, emerging technologies and technical skills, technical staff as teachers and technical partnerships.

It makes 16 overarching recommendations to guide delivery of this vision. A series of targeted recommendations for specific stakeholder groups: employers of technical staff, funders, government and policy makers, professional bodies and learned societies and the technical community have also been proposed.

Today is the launch of the next round of applications to our various funds (Technical Placement Scheme, Technical Conference & Skills Fund and Collaborative Technical Training Fund). The applications are open until 1 February 2022 with the programmes to be completed by June 2022.

Further details and how to apply can be found here.

We have a couple of opportunities to share with you to feed in to some national work on the Future Research Assessment Programme and a study that is looking at how the Apprenticeship Levy is utilised to support technical training.  Also some information about the launch of the Technician Commitment Collaboration Fund.

 Technician Commitment Collaboration Fund

We are pleased to launch a second round of the Technician Commitment Collaboration Fund. The Collaboration Fund is a small grants scheme which provides funding to Technician Commitment Signatory Institutions to pump prime and enable collaborative projects with external partners to advance the aims of the Technician Commitment.

Apprenticeship Levy for Technical Training

As part of its culture change work, the TALENT project is exploring the current use of the apprenticeship levy for technical training in universities and research institutions.

Opportunity to feed into the development of the next national assessment exercise

As part of the Future Research Assessment Programme, the four UK higher education funding bodies (Research England, Scottish Funding Council, Higher Education Funding Council for Wales, and Department for the Economy, Northern Ireland) have launched a survey to gather feedback on REF 2021 from the research community, including those in research-related roles: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/REF2021FeedbackSurvey. A key strand of the programme will consider how research assessment can support a positive research culture.