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EURAXESS Researchers in motion

Leiden University

Leiden University

Leiden University (in Dutch: Universiteit Leiden) was founded in the city of Leiden in 1575, and is the oldest university in the Netherlands. It is currently divided into seven major faculties which offer approximately 50 undergraduate degree programmes and over 100 graduate programmes, covering a wide range of knowledge fields

  • Humanities
  • Law
  • Medicine
  • Mathematics and Natural Sciences
  • Social and Behavioural sciences
  • Archaeology
  • Governance and Global Affairs
  • Humanities

Every year, around 400 PhD candidates defend their dissertation at Leiden University, and the institution offers a number of career services to support researchers on questions about their career, personal profile, as well as the job market and job applications.

 

Engagement activities

Career Days: One of such career services directly supporting the engagement with business are visits to employers outside academia

This is a programme particularly aimed at early stage researchers with the goals of:

  1. Increasing PhD candidates’ awareness about possible attractive careers outside academia and the required skills
  2. Encouraging PhD candidates to enhance their skills portfolio during their PhD trajectory
  3. Encouraging and showing PhD candidates how to easily build their network of potential employers outside academia.

The program starts with a kick-off meeting that is supervised by the central Career Counselling Agency of Leiden University. The aim of this session is to prepare PhD candidate for visiting employers in order to get the most out of the visits and to learn more about networking in general. During this start session, the following topics are discussed:

  • How do you prepare for a visit to an employer / company / external contact?
  • How can you use social media and LinkedIn for this cause?
  • What is meant by 'transferrable skills'? And how do you find out which skills are important in the various sectors?
  • What are our own unique selling points and skills as PhD Candidate/ Postdoc?

Subsequently, the PhD candidates visit different potential employers. The visits start with an in-house presentation by the organization. After that, the PhD candidates meet with a number of employees in small group settings to ask them any question they have. Ideally, the employee has a doctorate him/herself to be able to speak from both “realities”.

 

Stakeholders involved:

Within the Leiden University:

  • PhD Coach or other person organising visits. This could also be done by PhD Candidates themselves.
  • Alumni-officer to help identify interesting organisations to visit where “alumni PhD” are working.
  • Career Counselling Agency preparing and hosting the kick-off meeting.

Business partners:

  • Andersson Elffers Felix (AEF), a a consultancy firm, specialized in public safety, healthcare, education, and research, culture, organizational reviews and re-design, and complex stakeholder environments.
  • Elsevier, an information and analytics company and one of the world's major providers of scientific, technical, and medical information.
  • The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NOW), the national research council of the Netherlands and main science funding organization in the public sector.

 

What can EURAXESS learn from this?

Although this particular initiative was launched thanks to a grant by SoFoKleS (a Dutch social fund for the knowledge sector focused on field of the academic labour market), the experience shows that the visits are easy to organise and don’t require much budget. Some key tips for running the would be:

  • External business partners receiving the visits should ideally cover different sectors (private to public).
  • Reaching out to the PhD candidates can be done with a short e-mail shortly explaining that you would like to organize a visit and discuss the possibilities on the phone.
  • After picking a date, send out the invitation to the researcher’s and ask them to register. Prepare a number of questions and short tasks for the participants to work in advance to ensure they do not arrive at the visit unprepared (e.g. check LinkedIn profile; prepare elevator pitch about their research, etc.).
  • Facilitate networking by bringing small present to thank both, the participating researchers as well as the people in the organizations hosting the visit.
  • Don’t plan too many work visits. 2-3 per year is a good frequency when allowing PhD candidates from all years to participate.

 

 

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