Tampere Institute for Advanced Study Mentoring Handbook : Version 1.0

Tampere Institute for Advanced Study Mentoring Handbook Version 1.0 Rebecca Boden Juha Teperi November 2022 Tampere Institute for Advanced Study Mentoring Handbook Version 1.0 Layout: Marjukka Virkajärvi © Authors & Tampere University ISBN 978-952-03-2685-2 (e-publication) Trepo, the Open Institutional Repository of Tampere University Tampere University 2022 Table of Contents Who is this Handbook for? 1. What is mentoring and why might you benefit from it? ........................ 1 The realities of researchers’ careers What can we do as an academic community to make things better? OK, why mentoring and what is it anyway? What should the university community be doing to help me? 2. Let’s talk careers and strategies to have a successful one...................... 3 Careers and strategies Thinking strategically about yourself What do you need to do? 3. Mentoring Processes and Practices (at Tampere IAS and possibly elsewhere) ..................................................................................... 8 What about the mentors? How do mentors and mentees get together? How do mentors and mentees decide they can work together? 4. Doing the work .......................................................................................... 11 What should the ground rules be? Structuring the relationship through concrete activities/outputs The five-year strategic career plan Compiling a CV 5. Resource Library ....................................................................................... 21 Information Sheet for Potential Mentors .................................................. 25 Tampere IAS Tool for Identifying Mentoring Needs and Capabilities ... 26 CV Template .................................................................................................. 27 Who is this Handbook for? This Handbook is a collaborative production by people in and associated with Tampere Institute for Advanced Study, at Tampere University. During 2021–2022, the IAS ran a pilot mentoring scheme with its Research Fellows. This small action learning project was designed to cooperatively develop an approach to mentoring that would assist the Fellows, but which could also be shared with the rest of the Tampere University community, and beyond. We took a holistic approach to this work. We didn’t just focus on the practicalities of a mentoring scheme, like how to get a mentor or how often should you meet, important though such things are. We also placed great emphasis on an approach to building and enjoying a successful academic career that can be operationalised through mentoring arrangements. Accordingly, after briefly introducing mentoring, in Section 2 this Handbook talks about how to approach building a career in a purposive and considered way. Then, in Sections 3 and 4, we turn to how mentoring can support that career-development activity. This Handbook is a practical guide to mentoring and captures what was learned during the project. It’s also a dynamic document – we hope that, as experience and understanding grows across the University and beyond, we can capture that and incorporate it into this Handbook. So, if you have feedback or material to share that you think could be useful to others, please email this to [email protected] Please don’t treat this Handbook as a cookbook, telling you exactly what to do and how to do it. Rather, it is like a (travel) guidebook: you use it to acquaint yourself with general ideas and concepts, and then pick the pieces that you think serve you best. Mentoring requires mutual consent and collaboration – this Handbook is merely a resource for colleagues to use as they together think best – or not at all. We hope you find it useful. A final note: this handbook is made public with the intention to allow as wide use of it as possible. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Tampere, November 2022 Rebecca Boden Juha Teperi 1 1. What is mentoring and why might you benefit from it? The realities of researchers’ careers Being an early or mid-career academic, almost anywhere in the world, is a pretty hard task right now. Precarious employment, long chains of short term jobs, escalating work demands and performative pressures around what to work on and where to publish etc. can all contribute to a difficult employment environment. This creates intense and often unpleasant pressures on people. This isn’t just bad news for researchers; the current nature of the academic work environment can lead to a distortion of the knowledge-building work of universities. That is, these kinds of employment pressures can adversely affect what academics do and how we do it, to the detriment of science and society. For instance, research agendas or publication plans can be influenced by the need to get a job rather than what is good science. So, how can researchers build good, successful and enjoyable careers, whilst maintaining their integrity and producing excellent and useful work in such an environment? How can they balance their own career desires with the increasing workplace expectations placed on them? Getting this right is certainly important – happy, fulfilled scientists are much more creative and innovative, and produce much better work. Everybody wins if researchers are happy in their work. What can we do as an academic community to make things better? One option is to wait around for wholesale global higher education reform. Another is for individuals, with help and support from colleagues, to exercise their agency and try to make the best working career for themselves (and thereby benefit their institutions). This won’t solve every problem of course – the issues in higher education are too fundamental for that – but it can be an effective approach in many ways and, at the very least, gives the individual some sense of control over difficult and turbulent circumstances. The approach Tampere IAS takes is grounded in such notions of proactive self-help. And that help has to have, at its heart, the best interests of the researcher. Accordingly, this Handbook uses the metaphor of the bus 🚌, and the notion that the individual researcher should always be in the driving seat of their own bus. Buses are useful, they help people, and they do good work. They also travel. Where the bus goes and how good it is ultimately depends upon the driver, although they also have constraints like traffic rules and bosses back at the bus garage – they have to operate in contexts. Buses also have passengers who board and get off but who, for longer or shorter periods, accompany the driver on the journey. Bus drivers have to cooperate with and interact positively with the passengers. 2 Generally, how well a bus proceeds is dependent on the actions, skills and decision making of the person at the wheel. Drivers have agency but also have to be flexible, adaptive, care for their passengers and take responsibility. So this Handbook helps early and mid-career researchers (and those who support and help them) to learn about how they might, metaphorically, drive their own career bus – how to carefully, and reflexively, make their own way successfully and productively through a complex set of social and institutional relationships. OK, why mentoring and what is it anyway? The terms ‘coaching’ and ‘mentoring’ often get used interchangeably. Strictly, coaching is a ‘pull’ activity, encouraging people (or them encouraging themselves) to find ways to achieve what they want to achieve and are capable of. It often comprises encouraging the individual to set very specific goals and then making them accountable for meeting them. Mentoring can be seen as more ‘push’ – the deliberate steering towards specific competencies, ways of doing things, and understandings. Importantly, mentoring is an enabling, not a directing activity. That is, mentoring should equip the mentee to drive their own bus. In truth, coaching and mentoring are on a spectrum and the boundary between them is a fuzzy one. It’s important not to get too hung up on distinctions. This Handbook uses the term mentoring, but it’s likely that some of your work will stray towards coaching – that’s also fine. What should the university community be doing to help me? The traditional understanding of a university is that it is a self-governing community of scholars – people who have come together to further science, knowledge creation and teaching. In current times, sometimes we lose sight of that and rely rather too much on ‘management’ to direct what is done at a university. This Handbook emphasises that we are a community, and that if we assist and support others, everyone benefits. Good mentoring comes from having such a culture of mutual support and enablement, especially for early and mid-career researchers. Mentoring schemes can have great effects in terms of building stronger and more collegial working communities. Jussi had a doctorate in public administration from a good university but became discontented when he was on his second short term university contract with poor prospects for a permanent job. His more senior (and permanent) colleagues wanted him to stick around, but he decided to retrain as a tax officer, rising to quite a senior level. After five years, the academic employment situation had eased, and he realised that he had new and valuable financial skills which could be used in research on public administration. He returned to the academy – but to a business school rather than a politics department because he realised that there were much better opportunities there in a difficult university environment. 9 of their wider academic communities. They sometimes find it hard, but also very rewarding, work. Mentors also find that mentoring helps them to reflect on and develop their own work and careers. This work also helps mentors to demonstrate their leadership skills and commitment to the development of the academic community – so it helps them to nurture their own careers too. In sum, being a mentor is really important ‘good citizen work’ inside the academy and needs to be rewarded and celebrated. Developing a pool of mentors needs to be undertaken proactively to ensure that there is a sufficient number around and active. Without this, there’s a risk that mentoring either doesn’t happen, or happens randomly and fails to reach the people who really need it or give them what they need. In Tampere IAS, the choice of mentors is not limited to the pre-existing pool. Mentors can be identified outside the pool, typically in cases where a special sort of mentor is needed or wanted. Mentoring isn’t a skill that comes naturally – we need to think about it, reflect on what we do and learn from others in developing our mentoring styles. Mentoring skills need continuous work and attention. To help develop these skills, Tampere IAS provides training workshops for mentors. The core of the training currently consists of two half-day sessions, organised towards the end of the calendar year. These provide an opportunity to reflect on what it is to be a good mentor and to discuss mentoring with colleagues. These training sessions are highly recommended to all researchers who plan to be active IAS mentors. The sessions are also open to all senior colleagues across the university provided there are places. In addition, the IAS will hold an annual half-day internal conference for mentors and mentees, where everyone can come together to share and learn about mentoring practices. The conference is open to all colleagues across the university. To enrol in the training workshops, and to attend the mentoring conference, please follow the information on the mentoring pages of Tampere IAS at https://research.tuni.fi/tampere-ias/mentoring/. You can also request information from [email protected]. How do mentors and mentees get together? Like any 1-2-1 relationship, the appropriate matching of mentees and mentors is important, can be difficult, and at times downright problematic. Many mentoring schemes operate on a kind of ‘arranged marriage’ basis – effectively, someone simply allocates mentors to mentees. Reported experience is that this can be a bit hit and miss and can have poor outcomes. On the other hand, some people in our project said that being almost randomly allocated a mentor could lead to 10 serendipitous benefits as they were challenged by perspectives that they had never met before. However, generally speaking, individuals’ mentoring competencies and needs vary considerably, and only the people directly involved in the relationship can know if it is going to work. As such, we think allocation of mentors to mentees as a technical administrative procedure is usually best avoided. Another approach is simply to rely on mentees finding their own mentor. Often, senior academics are motivated to act as a mentor, when a younger colleague has identified them personally as someone having something important to share. But this approach can also be problematic – it places the onus on less experienced and perhaps less confident colleagues to go and ‘ask for favours’ from busy people who they might be a bit in awe of. Those who might feel somewhat marginalised can have real difficulties in such circumstances. We found that a hybrid system is best, one that has two routes. The first is that mentees can simply approach someone of their choosing, supported by the materials IAS provide, and see if they can sort things out for themselves. A second route is that the IAS scheme has a pool of recognised mentors who have suitable experience of have had some training and have specifically indicated a willingness to take on this work. These potential mentors will all identify how they prefer to work and the sorts of things that they can help people with. This panel of mentors can then be approached by mentees to ask for help. Again, IAS provides materials and resources to assist in this process (see Chapter 5: Resource Library, go to p. 21, Section A: Tools for use in preparation for mentoring process). If these approaches fail, a third, failsafe, option is available. The IAS office can become more directly involved in identifying a suitable mentor. The important thing is to make sure that mentees find mentors, but also to keep it flexible and under the control of the mentee. How do mentors and mentees decide they can work together? Before mentors and mentees get together, it is important that mentors understand what they can offer and be able to articulate it. The IAS aims in its training and through its conference to help mentors understand what their particular strengths are and who they work best with. The IAS has developed a simple one-page information sheet for mentees to use when initially approaching a potential mentor for assistance. It can be found in Chapter 5: Resource Library, go to p. 21, Section A: Tools for use in preparation for mentoring process). The mentees must also give careful initial thought to what they need. The work on thinking strategically about your career outlined in Section 2 above is designed to help with this. It won’t necessarily be possible for mentees to be definitive about what they 11 need – but that initial strategic thinking will form a valuable basis of an exploratory discussion with prospective mentors. The IAS has prepared a Tool for Identifying Mentoring Needs and Capabilities (included in Chapter 5, Resource Library, go to p. 21, Section B). It’s designed for mentees to think about and express their needs. It aims to help start a discussion with prospective mentors – not to be a definitive or demanding shopping list. And the same identification tool can be used by mentors when registering with the pool of mentors, to identify areas where they feel most confident to provide their support. Mentees can then approach their prospective mentors with a copy of this Handbook and the results of their use of the tool and initiate a discussion as to whether they can work together successfully. People have their own way of approaching such discussions. Mentors who participated in the IAS project told us of a variety of approaches that they used to have initial discussions about how to mutually decide if the pairing was functional, and to decide how they would work together. It really helps if mentees go along to initial discussions having done some strategic planning work so that they at least have some sort of idea about what they need and how they like to work. 4. Doing the work What should the ground rules be? Because this is a relationship between mentor and mentee, it is up to the individuals involved to shape it and manage it. However, we think that there are some basic rules that need to be observed by everyone. Confidentiality – things said in the context of mentoring need to stay between the people directly involved unless it’s mutually agreed otherwise. So it’s not Gabriela is a biomedical scientist, whose academic career has advanced well. Now she is at crossroads: one of her key findings holds a promise of a major innovation. She is contemplating the possibility of bringing the innovation to the market by forming a startup company. She has enrolled in a mentoring programme. Through a mutual friend, she was introduced to Helen, one of the top researchers in her research area. Helen promised to act as the mentor for Gabriela, and from the first meeting, they enjoyed being able to discuss difficult questions. However, it turned out that Helen had limited experience in innovations, and she had never worked in or closely with commercial enterprises. Gabriela and Helen decided together that Gabriela would look for another mentor. However, when the two occasionally meet, they always take some time to have a chat. 12 OK to say ‘Anna finds you being her boss unbearable’ or ‘Arto plans on leaving as soon as he can’. Separating mentoring and management – generally, we have found that it is best to keep these roles separate. On our project, we found that managers’ perceptions of the needs to get the ‘best’ out of people for the organisation, or meet pressing organisational imperatives, could conflict with the needs of the individual – yet mentoring must be all about the individual. Mixing mentoring and managing roles can, we found, undermine confidence and trust in the process. In practice this means that it is inadvisable that the mentee’s formal supervisor acts as the mentor. Not seeking advantage -- mentoring is about helping the mentee to develop and should never ever be seen as a way of nurturing relationships that might lead to special favours or fixes that aren’t entirely proper. Yes, a mentor could help a mentor prepare for a job interview. No, they shouldn’t have a chat with the chair of the interview panel. Ideally, however you play it, mentors and mentees who agree to work together should have a clear understanding between them of what they aim to do and how – a mentoring plan. Some people like to write this down, others keep it more informal. It’s important to keep revisiting this agreement and modifying it to make sure that it’s working for both of you. Ideally, mentoring relationships shouldn’t have any fixed lifetime – they should last as long as they are useful and productive. That said, very short-term partnerships aren’t likely to be long enough to let you develop the kind of working relationship that will bring substantial benefits. It’s a good idea to have a regular discussion about whether the mentoring is doing the job intended and, if not, or if the mentee feels that they need something different from someone else, then either side should feel able to terminate it courteously, without any drama, and without feelings or accusations of guilt, failure or inadequacy. Structuring the relationship through concrete activities/outputs Mentoring works best if the work is, by mutual agreement, structured with some defined desirable outcomes – real things to be achieved. That way, you’ll avoid mentoring sessions becoming cosy chats that don’t really go anywhere. One way of structuring early conversations is to use the tool in our Resource Library to provide a list of potential topic headings. Outcomes might be very strategic and general. For instance • Developing a really fantastic CV • Developing a strategic career plan • Developing a strategy for funding applications 13 Or specific outputs might be shorter term and more tactical, nested within your strategic plan, such as • Making a major grant application – such as to the ERC • Establishing/leading a research group • Developing a major book proposal and delivering the manuscript. You, the mentee, decide – but we do strenuously suggest you have a clear focus. This, of course, does not imply that other relevant issues shouldn’t be elaborated on as you proceed. In our project, we structured the mentoring work around two core tasks – drafting a full, international-standard CV, and developing a rolling five-year strategic career plan. This had two main advantages. First, it gave mentees some solid, useful outputs from the process which can be used for job, promotion or grants applications etc. That is, they had documents that could be re-purposed to help them in their career stages. Second, working on these documents together gave a focus to the mentoring work and facilitated deeper reflection around the nature of mentee’s work and of their careers. These two documents should, ideally, complement each other. The CV stands as a record of achievement, justifying the narrative in the plan, which contextualises and explains it. The CV should inform the development of the plan – providing the data – and working on the plan should make you think about strengths or gaps in your CV. In the rest of this section, we will go through the strategic career plan and the CV, explaining how you might approach them. We hope this material gives mentors and mentees something to work together on that has a useful, tangible product. The five-year strategic career plan Why do a plan? A good way of making sure that you are in as much control as possible of where your career is going – driving your own career bus – is to write a rolling five-year strategic research plan. ‘Rolling’ simply means that you revisit the plan regularly, and at least once a year. This is a document in which you describe and analyse where you have got to in your career, what it is you want to achieve, and set out the steps necessary to achieving that. Your career plans might be to move out of universities – that’s fine, you still need a plan. Only poor plans can’t be modified – your plan needs to be reviewed reasonably regularly (the frequency of reviews will depend upon how fast-moving your career is). Both the initial development of a strategic career plan and its review are good activities for mentoring sessions. 14 We advocate writing this plan out formally because... • Writing is an exact and challenging mode of thinking • Writing your strategic plan down allows you to share it with mentors and peers and discuss it in a more concrete way • Writing it down facilitates self-reflection and the planning process • Having such a document comes in useful when you are applying for tenure, promotion or a new job – you have a good narrative text about yourself that can be readily re-purposed. For instance, most academic job applications either ask for a plan of future activities or a detailed covering letter in which applicants have to set out their ‘market stall’ of what they have done and where they want to develop. What’s the best approach? Let’s pause here for a moment and think about some concepts. Outputs are tangible things that get produced by a process – like journal papers that emerge from a research project. Outcomes are the consequences of a process – how things turn out in a more general sense – like opening up a whole new research field might be an outcome of a research process. Outputs are easier to count or measure than outputs. A common problem, in these performance-measurement-obsessed times, is for people to start their strategic career plans by promising all the papers they are going to publish and all the grants they will apply for etc. That is, they promise outputs of the type that they think will make senior colleagues happy. This isn’t a good approach – it’s the sort of performative box-ticking that leads to someone else driving your career bus. You can end up bouncing around in your work, losing your way and not really achieving the outcomes that are good for you and your career and what you are capable of. You might have a lot of outputs, but if that’s all you have, you aren’t driving your work forward – the quantity rather than the quality is likely to dominate, and the outcomes are likely to have little coherence. James and Raquel were the supervisors of a cohort of middle career tenure-track researchers and had to agree with them their five-year objectives. This had to be a formal document on a university form. The researchers all produced first drafts in which they promised x number of papers a year, y-thousands of euros, etc. – they were anxious to impress. James and Raquel were worried about this – they were anxious to ensure that this rising pool of talent really did something really creative and innovative. So they sent them all back to imagine where they wanted to be intellectually and pedagogically in five yearstime, then worked with them, backwards, to plan the outputs that would achieve their desired outcomes. All of the researchers have since more than fulfilled their promise. 15 So, here are some steps towards a strategic career plan that concentrates on outcomes, not outputs. Step #1 – Understanding yourself and your work – What does your bus currently look like? The first thing that’s important is to know and understand yourself and your work – to develop a narrative about yourself of who and what you are. A good way to think about this is in multiple, nested layers. We use this picture of a bus to explain this. Researchers usually start with a doctorate – a research topic. If you go on to a post-doc, that’s another topic. This might be closely related to the doctorate, building directly on it, or might be a venture in a different direction. Then (these days) there might be another post-doc/topic. Topics can be almost anything – papers, collaborations or funded projects etc. The topics are shown as the black dots in the windows of the bus in the picture. Topics can be loosely grouped together as agendas or themes - a group of broadly related items. The boundaries of the agendas are represented by the bus windows. As your career grows, you develop other, allied agendas – more bus windows – with more topics in them. They are discrete agendas, but somehow related because they are all developments of your work. Some of this work will take place inside universities and some of it might be in outside organisations/companies. The thing that links or connects all the agendas is the body of the bus itself - an envelope within which everything sits. Let’s call that bus body a personal 16 intellectual project – it’s what you, as a researcher, are ‘all about’ – what you’re driving. Mapping out these three nested layers – topics, agendas and the personal intellectual project – is a good starting point in strategic career planning as it can let you articulate a coherent narrative about what you have done and where you currently are career-wise. Don’t worry about taking some thoughtful, reflective time to do this – it can be a complex task, especially if you have been so busy bouncing around between short term contracts that you didn’t have time to think about your own bigger picture. Often, people find that doing this helps people to realise that they have some great opportunities that they hadn’t realised were there. New ideas tend to surface. Most people like to start this complex bit of work with their topics – those individual pieces of work, some large, some small, that make up most of the stuff on a CV and with which we tend to be most familiar. They are our building blocks. So itemise all of them and think about what characterises them. You will then need to group these topics into your agendas or themes. Don’t force every single piece inside a given agenda. Rather, aim at coherence. Essentially, this is about understanding the core of your work, including the identification of distracting outliers (i.e. that weird project you started and carry on with as a favour to a friend but which isn’t really helping your work…). People have different methods for doing this – some write a post-it note for each topic, then move them around on a table until they are sensibly grouped into agendas. Or you might use coloured pens to draw a diagram on some flipchart paper. It’s up to you. Mentors are useful at this stage as they can often see the bigger picture better than you can because you are in the middle of what can appear as a muddle. Don’t make these agendas too many, too full or too empty – four might be a good upper limit for number of agendas for someone who is early career (but that is a ceiling, not a target). And remember, some of those agendas might be more applied research or research-led professional practice. Once you have your research agendas, the difficult bit starts. You need to formulate your ‘personal intellectual project’ – this is the grand narrative that explains what your work is ‘all about’. This is the big picture stuff – it’s your bus that you’re driving. Think about how all the agendas are interrelated – even though at first they might look disconnected. As they are your agendas, there will be a central driving logic around why you developed them, even if you’ve never explicitly articulated that. You just must understand the unifying thread in your work. Some people find this quite self-revelatory. 17 Step #2 – Where is your bus going? Once you have a clear statement of what you’ve done/are doing and how it all fits together, you need to take your time to assess where you want to be in five years’ time – what you want your personal intellectual project bus to look like in the future, your outcomes. This is big picture stuff: what types of work do you want to be doing?; what subjects and specialisms?; what do you want to be noted for?; what expertise will you have? You might think to yourself ‘what will I be when I grow up?’ Whilst you need to realistically assess your own skills, abilities and opportunities, it’s also important to dream big, to be hopeful and to concentrate on the possible not the probable. Then work out how your personal intellectual project needs to change and develop from its current form. This will necessitate developing existing agendas and setting new ones. Some agendas might be left behind, like passengers getting off the bus. Agendas might be research or practice based – you might have an agenda that involves teaching or one that involves public engagement, or even working outside of universities in professional practice. Within those agendas, you’ll now need to define your new and emerging topics. These will be the activities of your work – papers, projects, courses, networks etc. etc. They are the nuts and bolts of how you progress your agendas. Tackling the plan in this reverse order – starting with the end goal of what you want your personal intellectual project to look like then working backwards through agendas and defining topics, the outputs you need (papers, networks, grants etc) will emerge naturally and be meaningfully related to your strategic career goals. What you do will be outcome driven, not output driven. You will be driving your own bus. Step #3 – How should the document detailing the plan be structured? Once you’ve been through all these analytical processes, you will need to actually draft your plan. A bit like an academic paper, a strategic career plan needs to be planned, drafted, redrafted, commented on by others and then rewritten/edited several times until you’ve got it right (for you). How you choose to present yourself in the plan is up to you, but here is a simple template that you might like to consider/adapt. 1. Start by explaining what your central, personal intellectual project is. A kind of pen-portrait of what and who you are as a researcher. This should be a coherent, brief and to-the-point picture of who and what you are as a professional – your major interests, disciplinary fields, theoretical approaches, aims etc. Don’t put too much detail in here – this is the headline news. 18 2. Next, say something like ‘I approach this broad field of interest through [number] research agendas. These are x, y and z….’ Just briefly name them. 3. After that paragraph, briefly introducing your agendas, it’s time to dive deep into each of them in turn. This is the meat of the plan. It’s possibly best approached in three stages, for each agenda in turn. What you have achieved so far on a specific agenda. So you might say: ‘My interest in … started in 2015 when I began a long collaboration with... Over several years, we had a series of government commissions to investigate … This work had significant impact in terms of shaping policy and regulations, as is evidenced in the numerous official reports [cite these]. Additionally, through more academic publications [cite these] I was one of the earliest academic researchers to bring consideration of…into the field of… And so on. So, this becomes a bit of a summary narrative of your CV – contextualising and explaining what you did and why you did it. Then say what you are doing now on this agenda. So you might say: ‘My recent work on [agenda] has two elements. First, I have recently … My 2021 paper [cite] is the most downloaded paper in…and has significantly informed recent public debate about this much-neglected topic… I am now developing a critique of recent policy changes for a further publication in…’ Then move on to the other themes, in the same vein. Now turn to what you will be doing on this agenda in the future. If you are moving away from it, say so – maybe saying it’s been great but you are refocusing on…, etc. If you are planning on expanding this area of work, explain that you see huge potential and then go into details around what you want to do and how you plan to make it happen. This needs to be aspirational but credible – try and be as specific as you can be. So, you might say something like: ‘Building on the success of my 2021 book, I will be developing an ERC grant on the topic of…’. Using this kind of approach, it should be possible to draw out your strengths in quite subtle and well-evidenced ways. Describing your past, present and future lets you weave in details of things like your doctoral students, international collaborations, impact, research grants and publications. You can also demonstrate your research leadership skills. So you can, quite subtly, say how good you are and create a really positive impression that there is a lot more to come. Your trajectory and velocity should shine through in all of this. 25 Are you interested in becoming a mentor of a Tampere Institute for Advanced Study Research Fellow? Tampere IAS helps its Research Fellows to strategically develop their careers. As part of this support function, IAS provides individually tailored mentoring opportunities. As well as supporting our Research Fellows, working as a mentor gives experienced academics a valuable opportunity to develop their own leadership skills. Tampere Institute for Advanced Study (Tampere IAS) is a multidisciplinary initiative with the ultimate goal of advancing scientific excellence. An integral part of Tampere University, the IAS contributes to the university’s ongoing development and strengthening of a thriving research community. Its principal activity is to recruit highly promising researchers in global calls and support them in developing their careers further. Most of the Tampere IAS Research Fellows are in their early or mid-careers. Mentoring by experienced colleagues is an obvious and effective tool for supporting the Fellows’ career advancement. During its first operational academic year in 2021-22, Tampere IAS ran a pilot mentoring scheme as part of a small action learning project. The aim was to provide Research Fellows, through an individually tailored process, with insights and advice to help them advance their careers well beyond their fellowships. The promising results from this pilot have been consolidated into the Tampere IAS mentoring scheme, which will become a fixed feature of the Institute’s work to support Fellows. The essential requirement for those interested in mentoring Research Fellows is a genuine willingness to support a colleague in ways driven by that individual’s specific needs. Whilst mentors are expected to have substantial academic research experience, there are no formal requirements in terms of their positions or years of experience etc. What is in it for the mentor? Our small pilot project showed that mentors find being in this kind of supportive role personally rewarding. This work had also given them a useful learning experience, as well as opportunities to develop further and demonstrate their leadership skills. Many mentors also feel that mentoring helps them in reflecting on and developing their own careers. The user-friendly Tampere IAS Mentoring Handbook is available to all potential mentors. And Tampere IAS offers concise training and reflection opportunities for mentors. These sessions are highly recommended, but not compulsory. You can learn more about the supporting materials and training at the Tampere IAS web site from late October 2022 onwards, or by making an enquiry to the Tampere IAS office (see below). The training sessions are planned for early December, with most of the mentoring processes commencing in January or February. The duration and intensity of each individual mentoring engagement is for the mentee and their mentor to decide. However, a minimum period of three months and four discussions is anticipated. We cordially invite you to this exciting endeavour. For any inquiries or support, please contact Tampere IAS at [email protected], or call us! Juha Teperi Marjukka Virkajärvi Director, Tampere IAS Coordinator, Tampere IAS +358 40 513 3714 +358 40 318 6697 26 Tampere IAS Tool for Identifying Mentoring Needs and Capabilities This simple tool is to be used by mentees to identify and express the domains where they believe they would gain most from a mentoring process with an experienced colleague; and by mentors to identify and express the domains where they are most confident in providing support. Please note that this tool is an early version; any comments to improve it are welcomed at [email protected] I am filling in the form as ___ a potential mentee ___ a potential mentor Please mark each domain according to expected gain: 0 – no gain expected / 5 - maximum potential __ Defining one’s long-term goals as an academic (“personal intellectual project”) __ Making career choices between the academia and other choices __ Becoming / acting as a research group leader __ Innovation and entrepreneurship __ Practical interdisciplinarity __ Communicating (about one’s academic work) __ Scientific publishing __ Developing media presence to support career advancement __ Outreach and other activities aimed at (societal) impact __ Developing one’s teaching portfolio __ Funding opportunities and tactics to succeed in applying __ Social engagement and interpersonal relations in professional life __ Achieving sufficient self-confidence (and assertiveness??) __ Balancing professional life with other life domains __ Other: __________________________________________________________ __ Other: __________________________________________________________ How important is it to have the mentoring counterpart from a scientific field close to my own? __ Choose 0-7 (0: not relevant; 1: not at all important; 7: necessary) Other issues that should be taken into account in pairing the mentor and the mentee: __________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________ Name (and contact details if not TAU employee):__________________________________________ The information on this form will not be presented outside IAS in an identifiable form. Information may be used for Tampere IAS development and related analytical purposes. Signed ___.___._____ _________________________________________________________ (in block letters] ____________________________________________________________________ 27 CV Template THIS TEMPLATE is just to prompt you – to get you started and isn’t meant to be prescriptive. We’ve left in some random examples of data from a real CV so you can see how it works. NAME Summary Write a one-page blurb about yourself as an academic and your ‘personal intellectual project’ – an overview of what you’re about as an academic. The aim is to give the reader a quick ‘pen picture’ of you and what you are about as an academic. Make yourself look interesting! Many people find this hard to do – ask a friend/mentor to help you so that you get a third-party perspective This is an index to the rest of your CV Section A: Personal record ……………………………………… 2 Section B: Research and academic/professional standing ….. 4 Section C: Management and academic leadership …………... 31 Section D: Teaching ……………………………………………… 35 PUT EVERYTHING IN REVERSE CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER! A. PERSONAL RECORD Name: Date of birth: Nationality: Education: Where you went to university and when 1979–1982 Graduate School, Department of Government, University of Manchester 1976–1979 School of Politics and Modern History, University of Manchester 28 Qualifications: List degrees and any other formal qualifications in reverse chronological order PhD, Faculty of Economic and Social Studies, University of Manchester FT1 and FT2 Examinations of Inland Revenue, leading to commissioning as Inspector of Taxes, Grade 7 (Principal). BA (Hons) Politics and Modern History, University of Manchester, 2.1 class. Awards and [e.g. prizes or special honours] distinctions: 2020–2023 Visiting fellow, CHEER, University of Sussex 2016–ongoing Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts Memberships: [e.g. of professional bodies or scholarly associations] Consortium of Higher Education Researchers (since 2016) Employment: List your jobs in reverse chronological order, starting with your current appoint. Say where you worked, your job title and a line or two about what you did. January 2017 to present: Professor and Director of the New Social Research programme, Tampere University, Finland. September 2011 to January 2017: Professor of Critical Management, University of Roehampton. NOTE PAGE BREAK!! B. RESEARCH, SCHOLARSHIP AND ACADEMIC/PROFESSIONAL STANDING Publications Academic journal papers: In press Put year of publication on left like this. Accepted papers mark as ‘in press’ 2021 Exploiting the exploitable: The financialisation of students in English universities, Boden R & Ng, W, Tiedenpolitikka, 2/2021: 45–51 2021 Pensioned Off: National Insurance in the UK, Boden R., Public Money and Management, online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09540962.2020.1862993 29 Authored books: 2020 Put year of publication on left like this. If the book is still being written but you have a contract, write ‘forthcoming’ and if it is with the publisher mark it as ‘in press’ 2005 The Academics’ Support Kit (ASK), a boxed set of six books by Rebecca Boden, Debbie Epstein and Jane Kenway, Sage: London. 808 pages. The Kit comprises the following titles: ➢ Getting Started on Research ➢ Writing for Publication ➢ Teaching and Supervision ➢ Winning and Managing Research Funds ➢ Building Networks ➢ Building an Academic Career 2004 Scrutinising Science, Rebecca Boden, Deborah Cox, Maria Nedeva and Kate Barker, London: Palgrave. 209 pages. ISBN 0-333-74969-3 Edited books and journal special/themed issues 2021 Put year of publication on left like this – and, as above, either ‘forthcoming’ or ‘in press’ 2020 International Studies in Sociology of Education, double special issue on ‘Escaping Numbers’, guest editors Nellie Piattoeva and Rebecca Boden, 29(1–2). Book chapters: 2021 Put year of publication on left like this – and, as above, either ‘forthcoming’ or ‘in press’ 2020 Performance-based funding, Boden R in SAGE Encyclopaedia of Higher Education, MJ Amey and M David (eds), London: Sage 2020 Human Resources Policies in Higher Education, Boden R in SAGE Encyclopaedia of Higher Education, MJ Amey and M David (eds), London: Sage Papers submitted/under review for publication It’s important to let the reader of your CV know what is ‘in the pipeline’. This lets them judge your trajectory. Put in the title, authors, journal, and stage of review. How Capital generates Capitals in English Elite Private Schools: Charities, tax and accounting, James, MD, Boden, R., and Kenway. J. British Journal of the Sociology of Education. Accepted subject to very minor revisions. 30 Work in progress for publication It’s important to let the reader of your CV know what is ‘in the pipeline’. This lets them judge your trajectory. Detail here any papers, books etc that you are working on. Say where you are sending papers (if you know). Aim to give a picture of what your CV might look like in two years and where you are going. The Happy Academic: Positive psychology interventions in universities,, Jackson R & Boden, R. Modelling student finance in England, Boden, R, Guermat C and Paul, S. Calling time on universities: workload allocation models and the datafication of academic work, Rowlands, J, Piattoeva, N and Boden R. Financial restructuring and its consequence in UK universities, Boden R and Ng, W. Published research reports: 2018 Put year of publication on left like this – and, as above, either ‘forthcoming’ or ‘in press’ 2014 Trade Credit: A Literature Review, with Salima Paul, Research Report from the British Business Bank, Available at http://british-business-bank.co.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2015/02/Annex-2-TCEFG-Evaluation-Literature-ReviewFinal.pdf 2014 Evaluation of the Trade Credit Enterprise Finance Guarantee Pilot, SQW Ltd, BMG Research, Paul S and Boden R,(2014), Research Report from the British Business Bank, Available at http://british-business-bank.co.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2015/02/Annex-1-TCEFG-Evaluation-Report-Final.pdf Media/Professional journal papers: 2021 Put year of publication on left like this – and, as above, either ‘forthcoming’ or ‘in press’ 2021 Why are some children worth more? Presentation at event hosted by The World That Matters on the launch of a report by Dr Sol Gamsu. https://youtu.be/LrWb47yAMN4 2020 Numbers! FreshEd podcast with Nelli Piattoeva available at https://freshedpodcast.com/nellipiattoeva-rebeccaboden/ Teaching materials and guides: 2021 Put year of publication on left like this – and, as above, either ‘forthcoming’ or ‘in press’ 31 2003 Einstein Network: CPD video entitled ‘AGMs – for communication and accountability, or a nice day out?’ With Nic Apostolides. 2003 2001 CIPFA Study Guide on Public Policy and Taxation, CIPFA distance education programme, Rebecca Boden (sessions 1–12) University Working Papers: 2021 Put year of publication on left like this – and, as above, either ‘forthcoming’ or ‘in press’ 2009 Science, Standards and Infrastructure Provision through the PFI - a case study of the National Physical Laboratory, Rebecca Boden and Deborah Cox, Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, University of Manchester Working Paper Series No 575. Funded Research: Awaiting decision or under development Completed and ongoing 2018–2021 Dates, etc., on left, then list funded project title, partners and €€€ 2013–2017 UNIKE (Universities in the Knowledge Economy), FP7 funded Initial Training Network, value to Roehampton around £480,000, total project €4.3 m. Conferences, workshops and seminars organised: 2016 Annual Tax Research Network conference, University of Roehampton. 2015 Organising committee member for biennial Gender and Education Association conference, University of Roehampton. Professional, Advisory or Consultancy Work: This is a good section where you can include societal impact. If you do a lot of this, consider having a whole separate section. 2014 Consultant to Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, Ministry of Defence, regarding transferable governance approaches and management skills. 2014 Consultant to BIS on evaluation of a trade credit guarantee scheme. 32 Work as a Referee and as an Examiner 2021 This is for grant application evaluation work and PhD exams, etc. 2021 Doctoral examiner, CHEER, University of Sussex 2021 End of award reviews for SEDA, Latvia 2020 Examiner Professional doctorate, Sussex University. 2020 Reviewer ESRC proposal Editorial Board Membership 2014–ongoing Journal of Tax Administration 2009–2017 Journal of Accounting in Emerging Economies Reviewer of articles for academic journals LIST THEM ALL Accounting Forum Financial Accountability and Management Accounting, Organisations and Society Auditing and Accountability Journal Journal of Income Measurement British Accounting Review Corporate Governance International Review Critical Perspectives in Accounting Gender and Education Higher Education Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Accounting Conference International Journal of Economics and Accounting International Studies in the Sociology of Education Journal of Accounting in Emerging economies Journal of Australasian Teachers of Tax Association Journal of Education Policy 33 Public Service in a Professional Capacity 2018–2020 Things like being on charity boards or with community groups 2009–2018 Tax Research Network steering group member. I founded the TRN in 1992. 1996–2000 Membership Secretary of the British Accounting Association, a trustee and a member of the Executive Board. Major Academic Visits and collaborations 2021 Visits to other universities, who you collaborated with, etc. 2017–ongoing Working with professor jane Kenway, Monash University Australia on the funding of elite private schools. 2015 Visiting Scholar, CREFI, Deakin University Australia. Invited Presentations/Papers 2021 Why are some children worth more? Keynote at launch of a report by Dr Sol Gamsu. https://youtu.be/LrWb47yAMN4 Dec 2020 University of Jyvaskyla, special symposium on higher education, keynote speaker. October 2020 Paying the piper? Governance and VC remuneration, CHEER; University of Sussex Other papers and presentations since 2001 April 2021 Cooking the class books, British Sociological Association Annual Conference, online Dec 2019 The impact of the financialisation and privatisation of UK higher education on creativity and innovation, SRHE annual conference, Newport, Wales Dec 2019 The impact on social justice of the privatisation of higher education: A UK case study, AARE annual conference, Brisbane. Sept 2019 Life is a random walk: National Insurance in the UK, Tax Research Network annual conference, UCLAN, Preston. 34 NOTE PAGE BREAK! C. MANAGEMENT AND ACADEMIC LEADERSHIP Tampere University 2018–to date Major roles Other work University of …. 2015–2018 Major roles NOTE PAGE BREAK! D. TEACHING Pedagogic qualifications List all in reverse chronological order Research Students supervised – completed or under examination Name Mode Date Topic/Comments N.N. PT PhD Under examination Trade credit in SMEs N.N. PT PhD Awarded September 2016, minor revisions Gender and the accounting profession N.N. PT PhD Awarded September 2015, minor revisions Taxation policy and power N.N. PT PhD Awarded May 2014, minor revisions Governance of civil nuclear power station decommissioning N.N. PT PhD Awarded March 2013 Economic development and Welsh Devolution