Module 4 – Charting your path forward: prioritising areas for development
This module is all about taking ownership of your development journey and charting a course that aligns with your goals and ambitions as a researcher.
In this module:
- Review upcoming research activities you’re likely to engage in
- Identify specific expertise areas to develop further
- Prioritise your development goals within the context of your broader career aspirations
Prioritise areas for further development
In the previous modules, you reflected on your past achievements, mapped out your expertise, and started building your portfolio of evidence. Now it’s time to shift focus to the future and actively plan your development as a researcher.
In this module, you’ll take a proactive approach to your growth by identifying areas for further development and setting clear goals to guide you.
Activity: Map out your upcoming research activities
- Download the template Researcher profile: upcoming activities. You might prefer to record your thoughts elsewhere if you are already using a different system.
- Choose a timescale that suits your needs—this might be the next month, the next semester, or any other period that feels practical for your planning
- List your future research activities. Examples might include:
a. Writing reports or papers
b. Teaching courses
c. Preparing funding bids
d. Planning field trips
e. Applying for ethical approvals
f. Presenting to your supervisor or PI
Feel free to add any other relevant activities to your list! - Reflect and analyse each activity. Think about:
a. Skills and expertise required: What broader skills will you need or develop?
b. Alignment with the RDF: Just like in previous activities, consider which subdomains or descriptors of the Vitae Researcher Development Framework (RDF) each activity aligns with. - Plan your evidence collection: How will you gather and organize evidence for each activity as you complete it? Think about how you’ll track your progress and showcase your achievements.
By planning ahead, you’ll be setting a solid foundation for your ongoing development as a researcher!
Activity: Identifying your development priorities
You now have a great overview of the skills and expertise you’ve developed so far and the new skills you’ll be applying in your upcoming research activities. Now it’s time to decide which areas of your practice you’d like to focus on developing further.
- Review your ‘Researcher profile: upcoming activities’ and consider the skills and expertise needed for success in these tasks.
- Reflect on the following questions:
a. Which of these skills are completely new to you?
b. Which ones will you need to strengthen or expand to handle these upcoming activities confidently? - Make notes of these skills:
a. If you have sticky notes (or an electronic equivalent), jot each skill on a separate note. Some activities might need multiple skills or a series of steps to complete—break these down into individual skills for clarity.
No challenging activities coming up? No problem! Here are other ways to identify development goals:
- Look back at your ‘Researcher profile: prior and current expertise’. Are there RDF areas where you’d like to consolidate or improve your skills?
- Compare your current and upcoming activities side by side. Are there RDF areas not covered in either profile?
- Consider your longer-term goals: What skills will you need to reach them?
- Check back to the PDP/CPD requirements from professional bodies in your field. Are there any skills you want to update or refresh?
Now that you’ve identified the areas for development, your next step is to prioritize them as you prepare to create your professional development plan.
Taking the time to reflect and organize your goals now will give you a clear focus for building the skills that matter most to your growth as a researcher.
Prioritising your development goals
By now, you probably have a list (or a stack of sticky notes!) of skills, knowledge, and experiences you’d like to develop. If your list has more than a few items, it can be helpful to bring some order to it. This way, you can decide where to focus first and which goals are most essential.
One effective way to organise your priorities is Stephen Covey’s urgency-importance model.
Here’s how it works:
Covey’s model categorises each item by two simple factors: urgency and importance. By deciding if each item is either urgent or not, and important or not, you place it in one of four priority groups.
Urgent/Important model
- Urgent and important: These are your top priorities. Focus your energy here first.
- Important, but not urgent: After handling the urgent/important tasks, shift your focus to these items. Working here helps you make progress on key goals before deadlines become pressing. Some call this “being kind to your future self” by taking proactive steps on important projects in advance.
- Urgent, but not important: This quadrant often gets our attention next, but it’s often best to focus on important, not urgent goals first. Tasks in this category are urgent, but less meaningful to your long-term development.
- Not urgent, not important: These tasks can wait, or perhaps be left off your list altogether.
Try it out
In the next activity, you’ll use Covey’s model to sort your development goals into these quadrants. If you have another prioritisation approach you prefer or are curious about trying, feel free to use that instead—whatever helps you move forward!
Activity: Use Covey’s quadrants to prioritise your development areas
Now that you have your list of skills and expertise areas, it’s time to set priorities using Covey’s urgency-importance model.
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- For each skill, ask: is it important? is it urgent?
a. Important skills are those that are crucial to your overall progress—perhaps essential to completing a project or achieving a long-term goal. For example, mastering your institution’s research ethics process might be an important step since you cannot start collecting data without approval.
b. Urgent skills are ones you need to work on soon. Your sense of urgency could be days, weeks, or even months. Take into account deadlines, the time you have available, and any other responsibilities running alongside your research. - Place each skill into the most appropriate quadrant
Decide which quadrant (urgent/important, urgent/not important, not urgent/important, or not urgent/not important) each skill fits into. Now you have a clear snapshot of your top and secondary priorities, giving you a better idea of where to start. - Reflect on your quadrant layout
Consider these questions to shape your next steps:
a. Are there clusters of skills that would benefit from being developed together?
b. Do certain skills need to be tackled before others.
c. Are there any practical challenges I may need to navigate to tackle any of these skills?
- For each skill, ask: is it important? is it urgent?
Covey’s model is especially useful when planning complex tasks, like fieldwork, experiments, literature reviews, or conference planning. You’ll find the urgency aspect helpful as you move on to planning how to reach your goals, which we’ll cover in the next module.
Module summary
- Mapping out your upcoming activities can help you plan and prioritise your development activities.
- You can also plan your development by reviewing your evidence and identifying any gaps or areas for further development.
- It can be useful to use priorisation models such as Covey’s urgent/important quadrants to focus on the areas of development that will benefit you the most.
Now move on to the final module to learn how to plan and achieve your professional development goals.