Pitching Perfect: Leveraging your Research Communication, Public Engagement & Outreach Experience for a Rewarding Career

In my experience, I’ve only been able to reflect that I’ve got a certain skill once I’ve used it in a different environment.’ – Katrina Roberts

SPERM BIOLOGY!

Did that distract you?!

Well, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about distractions… more specifically, about the things we might feel guilty about giving time to during our PhD because people (supervisors, peers, even ourselves) consider them a ‘distraction.’

One of my big PhD ‘distractions’ – that I loved, but sometimes gave myself a hard time for because I felt like I should’ve been writing/ publishing/ doing other things instead – was outreach work. I still fondly remember the seminars on postmodernism that I ran for fourteen-year-olds. Indeed, many PGRs I meet are similarly drawn to work that involves making research, higher education, or both, more accessible. Considering this, I felt compelled to champion public engagement and outreach work a bit: to showcase it not as a distraction, but as an experience that can bring us significant career value.  

So, I sat down for a chat with Katrina Roberts, Head of Tutor Engagement at university access charity The Brilliant Club. Katrina, I was promised, had loads to say about the value and the transferability of skills gained from doing outreach and public engagement… and I was not disappointed.

Katrina studied for a PhD in sperm biology (see, there was a reason…) at the University of Sheffield, and was interested in public engagement and research communication from day one. The thing I loved most about research was talking about it! She admitted. She now works in a role where she both helps Postgraduate Researchers to communicate their research in schools (via the Brilliant Club’s Scholars’ Programme), and also supports access to higher education by working for an organisation focused on this goal.

However, Katrina emphasised from the start of our discussion how difficult it can be to realise the great skills you’re developing through doing research communication or outreach work. She said:

I don’t think most researchers have the head space to be reflective when they’re doing these things. Plus, in my experience, I’ve only been able to reflect that I’ve got a certain skill once I’ve used it in a different environment.’

As well as summing up in one sentence the difficulty that many researchers face in attempting to see our relevance to the world beyond academia, Katrina’s comments here confirmed to me that many of us might struggle to see:

1. Where our public engagement and outreach experience fits, and can help us to stand out; and/or
2. How to move specifically into a career focused on outreach, access to education, and/or public engagement post-PhD.

So, without further ado, let’s tackle those questions head-on.

Leveraging your outreach and public engagement skills & experience

1) Thinking on your feet

Firstly, Katrina explained, outreach and public engagement experience can help you to stand out by showing evidence that you can think on your feet. She elaborated:

Doing outreach in schools for example (like with the Brilliant Club) you might be in a tutorial with a group of young people, have planned all your content carefully, but then one of them asks you a tricky question that you have to try to answer without deviating from your lesson plan!  

To do that, you have to pivot and think on your feet, and that’s a skill that any job requires. You might do that consistently within your PhD, but doing it in a different setting, like in a classroom with young people who are waiting for an answer from you, is a different level of adaptability.

2) Pitching things correctly

Pitching things right is useful in any career which involves imparting information on an audience, Katrina explained. Agreed… I could think of many common career choices for PGRs that involve conveying information clearly to different audiences: policy-related work; medical communications; technical sales; museum work; content writing; research communication; patent law… the list goes on.

In career areas like these, Katrina explains: you need to be able to prepare for a meeting and think, what do these people want from me? What information do I have to convey, and what’s the most effective way to do that? It’s the exact same thing as communicating your research, it’s just different content. Being able to break down information for a target audience and then deliver it effectively is a great transferable skill.

3) Resilience

This was a quality that Katrina felt it might be easy to neglect when reflecting on how your public engagement or outreach experience might be useful when going for jobs.

PGRs may not fully appreciate resilience as a skill that comes from public engagement or outreach work, but it is. For example, sometimes your session just doesn’t go to plan, and the audience don’t really get what you were trying to do. In those situations, you have to go away, rethink, and not get disheartened.

It’s something that can really grab an interviewer’s attention too, in Katrina’s experience. She explained: If somebody I was interviewing told me how doing outreach and public engagement had developed their resilience, I’d not only find that interesting, but would feel that it also showed real self-reflection and self-awareness.

4) Creating an inclusive learning environment

Katrina was quick to emphasise that engaging in outreach, access, and widening participation work isn’t just useful if you want to pursue a career in this specific field, or in the career areas mentioned above. It’s useful if you want to be an academic as well. Katrina explained: through gaining this kind of experience, you develop an understanding of who your undergraduate students might be, and how they’ve come to reach university. When you know where those young people have come from, you’re able to create more inclusive learning environments and more inclusive teaching practices if you continue in academia.

Moving into a career in outreach, educational access, and public engagement

Public engagement and outreach experience certainly therefore seems to equip us with valuable skills to launch a career either within or beyond academia. But what if you’ve really got the bug and want to turn your passion for research communication, outreach, public engagement, and/or access to higher education into a longer-term career? Katrina had some great tips here, too.

1) Go beyond delivery to see the bigger picture:

If you want to move into this line of work longer-term, the most obvious thing is to actually do some of it while you’re a PGR Katrina began. However, that came with a caveat.

I don’t think doing something like being a student ambassador is enough. It’s a great start, but I don’t think it really gives you a sense of the purpose behind outreach work and what goes into the planning of it.

So, if taking on a role like a student ambassador or a public engagement demonstrator isn’t enough on its own, what else can you do to take your experience further? Dig deeper Katrina recommended, ask the organisers questions like ‘Why did you decide to do it this way?’ ‘How are you going to evaluate the activity?’ Develop your understanding of what it takes to DO outreach and public engagement activities. What are the universities’ priorities and agendas like, and how does this type of work fit into these?

2) Set up your own initiatives

The second thing Katrina recommended was to take ownership over your own idea.

See if there any initiatives you can establish on your own, and if there are pots of funding that you can apply for to create your own outreach or public engagement activities during your PhD. For example, during my PhD I worked with a couple of colleagues to design a board game about reproduction. We got some funding to prototype it and to take it to some events; eventually we did a digital version of it. Be able to show that you’ve come up with your own ideas, developed your own stuff, and got your own funding. I’m not saying it’s easy to do on top of everything else, but those avenues are out there.

3) Explore getting involved in widening participation at postgraduate level

In the UK certainly, over the past 10 years, there has been a growing interest in trying to widen access to PhD-level study. Katrina described how this can also be a route to gaining valuable outreach our HE access experience:

Read policies Katrina encouraged, for example, what’s your university’s access and participation plan? How does it relate to PhDs, and what is your institution doing to try to ensure that PhD study is accessible to a broader range of people? See if your institution has been awarded any funding for this, and if so, how you can get involved.

My chat with Katrina not only affirmed my belief that public engagement, research communication, and outreach work are enriching experiences that can help us to develop valuable knowledge and skills. It also made me think about the vast array of career areas that people who are drawn to these kinds of activities could explore to keep that flame alive longer-term.

To finish then, if you’re lit up by communicating complex information in easily digestible ways, or by making research, higher education, or both, more accessible, then perhaps consider:

• Working for a charity or organisation focused on educational access or social mobility, like The Brilliant Club, The Access Project, or UpReach
• Outreach, widening participation, or schools’ liaison roles within universities
• Research communication roles: think about the kinds of organisations that undertake and/or fund research, and thus need to communicate that research to wider audiences… be that funders, patients, the public, young people, government and policy makers, etc. This work might be done by Research communications officers/ managers, in a variety of settings including universities, charities, research or scientific facilities, research funders, professional bodies or learned societies
• Industry jobs that involve turning technical information into accessible formats for customers and other stakeholders, e.g. scientific adviser, helping a brand to make sure the claims it makes about its products are both compelling for customers, but also in line with regulatory and advertising guidelines
• Medical communications