Research Consultancy training workshop

Being a part-time PhD student, as well as someone that has spent a long time in my career teaching research skills and study skills, I don’t go to many PhD workshops. I talk about this in my ‘reflections’ post, but in general, to me, it feels disingenuous to get points from classes I could teach, so I usually get my points from alternate routes like delivering training, or going to conferences, but I do tend to keep my eye out for interesting things that I can join in with so that I can meet some fellow PhD students and learn something new.

I have been interested in consultancy for a while, as a broader concept, but also as something that might be interesting to get into. I know a number of friends and colleagues across different institutions that do consulting, either as a side hustle or have moved into consulting, as lone operators or with consulting firms specialising in the library and information sector. It is this curiosity that led me to sign up for a Research Consultancy Training workshop held by the UCL Community Research Initiative (CRI). The whole day was very busy, with a lot to learn in the morning with a brilliant session with Kohlrabi consulting, and a great opportunity to put the work into practice in the afternoon. I thought that as part of the initial blogs on this site that it would be interesting to reflect on that day, as this is what has led to this website existing after all!

I didn’t take any pictures of the event, but I took my laptop with me which is covered in stickers and my own personal collection of positive thinking - my PhD will be brought to you by the phrase ‘Progress not Perfection’

While a lot of the consulting reports I have seen have naturally been related to my own sector, the first and most notable thing we learned was just how broad research consulting can be, and the value that it can bring to different corners of industry, and makes great use of fundamental research skills whatever your specific subject background. Whether the commissioning group needs something relatively short term like assistance with a searching and summarising prior research or data crunching, to something more complex and time consuming like planning and running research activities like questionnaires or focus groups, these are all fundamental research skills that most students learn, especially those with a background in the Social Sciences.

One thing from the morning session that stayed with me was the valuable exercise about understanding and managing discussions in consultancy, key being the knowledge that the people that you are working with may not know how research works and you might need to carefully manage expectations when developing projects. It is important to remember that the unit of success for research taking place in the real world isn’t the journal article, but oftentimes something much more practical and getting too technical actually could be a detriment to the relationship between you and the rest of the research team. A related activity led on from this ‘audience analysis’ to talk about the approach to these discussions, the value of active listening and allowing them to tell you their needs, being respectful of their expertise and knowledge of their respective fields and establishing project goals together. I found it really interesting to think about the balance needed for these conversations, creating a connection and making the client comfortable in an environment that they may not have been before, while remembering the need to work towards a specific goal and not let anyone get too carried away and create a project that is unattainable. Its an interesting conundrum!

The afternoon of the workshop was pretty nerve wracking as we were dropped in the deep end with real clients! The CRI team run a service on behalf of UCL putting charity partners in touch with researchers and students to work on projects, and so as newly trained research consultants we were put to work creating project briefs to be taken forward. Each table was connected with a newly-arrived charity partner and we had to work together to create a research brief to be taken forward by a UCL Masters student. My reflections on this are quite simple and pretty much led us here - it was fun. My favourite part of my job has always been talking to people about research and research projects and while the context was different, with having to spend the time up front to learn about the charity and its goals, it was still a great time! As I was the first person to return to the table and meet our client, I did feel a little like I ended up leading the conversation but I think that by being there first the connection was made and it was very difficult to hand off the discussion to other people in the group. I did try, I promise!

This final exercise definitely brought home to me how accessible consultancy could be, especially for someone like me who has a broad background across social sciences. It also allowed me to find another use for the years of conversations I have had trying to tease out needs from project team members, academic colleagues or students in any number of contexts. I think it was in this that I realised that this might be something I could really enjoy, especially if it was connected to my areas of expertise or my research topic. After telling my husband about everything that I had learned on the way home and musing on the viability of me branching out into this area (and how disappointed I was that I didn’t have capacity to join the CRI programme properly), this website was born. While I have very limited capacity right now, given that I work full time and am working on my PhD, I wanted to start formulating the offer and start small while starting to build towards a side hustle of my own, after the PhD, naturally.