Continuing Professional Development Policy

1. Purpose

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) after essential training allows individuals to keep their skills and knowledge up to date. SEA DREAM-funded researchers must either have completed or have a plan to complete the training that is appropriate for their role and the specific tasks they undertake. In addition to this, CPD should be integrated into all roles to allow people to grow to their full potential.

• Environment and Culture: This principle emphasizes that excellent research requires a supportive and inclusive research culture. It aims to create positive environments and cultures where all researchers can flourish and achieve their full potential, recognizing that healthy working environments attract and develop a diverse workforce, positively impact performance, and enhance staff engagement. This principle necessitates a proactive and collaborative approach among all stakeholders.
   
• Employment: This principle states that researchers should be recruited, employed, and managed under conditions that recognize and value their contributions. It highlights that good employment conditions improve researcher wellbeing, make research careers more attractive, and lead to research excellence. Key aspects include fair, transparent, and merit-based recruitment, progression, and promotion, effective performance management, and a good work-life balance. It also addresses challenges like employment insecurity and career progression, aiming for equality of experience and opportunity regardless of background, contract type, or personal circumstances.
   
• Professional and Career Development: This principle underscores that professional and career development are essential for researchers to reach their full potential. It aims to ensure researchers are equipped and supported to be adaptable and flexible within the diverse global research environment and employment market. It recognizes the critical importance of continuous professional and career development, especially as researchers pursue a wide range of careers beyond academia.

For each of these principles, the Concordat outlines clear responsibilities for the four main stakeholder groups: researchers, managers of researchers, institutions, and funders.

Continuing professional development is good for research because it:

• strengthens researchers
• ensures the integrity and quality of research
• improves the research environment.

Everyone working on research has a responsibility to engage with and undertake CPD. Managers of staff also have a responsibility to allow and encourage their staff to do so. This applies in all research settings, including higher education institutions, research institutes, health care providers, Local Authorities, not for profit or commercial organisations. 

In this policy “researchers” means SEA DREAM-funded:

• consortium lead
• consortium members
• staff employed on awards, including technical experts and technicians

2. Types of CPD

2.1 At the individual level

(i) Project-specific skills training for researchers

Project-specific skills are defined as those required to complete the technical aspects of a project. Applying organisations can ask for funding to cover any project-specific skills training researchers need for the project in their grant application. This could include (and is not limited to) biosafety, animal handling, scientific equipment training, microscopy, language training and specific data analysis techniques. Costs will need to be justified in the application.

The time allocated for project-specific skills training must be in addition to the number of days required by local regulations or defined by the employing organization for the annual career-based CPD time.

(ii) Career-based continual professional development for researchers

We expect organisations to provide and fund career-based CPD. In addition to project-specific skills, researchers should be supported to obtain broader skills to allow them to develop as a research professional. People learn in different ways and CPD can be formal or informal, guided or self-directed. CPD can be (but is not limited to) courses, e-learning, coaching, action learning sets and time for reflection.

Research staff should have access to a range of CPD that will cover many topics and as a minimum should include/cover:

• Responsible conduct of research: the skills necessary for good research practice including record keeping, research design and analysis, sharing research outputs, data management and data protection - organisations should draw on the principles of the UK Concordat on Research Integrity where appropriate, and/or the International Singapore Statement on Research Integrity when designing these programmes.
• Guidance on how people at all career stages can support or create a diverse, inclusive and positive environment, including the management of bullying and harassment when it occurs, wellbeing and mental health.
• Leadership and management training, and mentorship as appropriate for current role and planned career trajectory.
• Profession-specific skills retention: the practice, knowledge and time necessary to maintain and improve the skills required by your profession, for example clinicians who need to practise a certain number of hours to retain registration (Note: SEA DREAM will neither pay for this training other than the time needed to do it nor the cost of belonging to professional bodies/organisations).

If the development needs of SEA DREAM-funded researchers cannot be met by organisational provision, or the quality is inadequate, they should be supported to access external CPD. In this case, applying organisations can ask for up to 2,000 USD for training and course fees per person per year. Costs need to be justified in the application.

(iii) Capacity development for research support staff

SEA DREAM recognizes the importance of research support staff fully or partially employed under a SEA DREAM grant such as staff involved in:  

• grant management support
• financial and administrative support
• data management
• ethics & compliance
• monitoring & evaluation
• knowledge translation and dissemination

Therefore, organisations can request the costs for professional training and capacity development of these staff by providing relevant justifications in their grant proposals. However, the funding should only be used for the research support team fully or partially employed under a SEA DREAM grant and should not be paid into a generalised central fund that supports CPD across the entire organisation. 

All three types of continuing professional development support can be claimed for:

• staff from both consortium lead and consortium members
• staff employed with a total contract duration of at least 12 months, and
• working on the SEA DREAM grant for at least 25% full time equivalent

2.2 At the organisational level

• research specific skills
• leadership and mentorship skills
• knowledge transfer
• cross-organisational and cross-sector learning

These events must include at least 50% of participants fully or partially funded under the grant or funded within another SEA DREAM grant. Organisations can claim the costs of up to 2,500 USD per day, with a maximum amount of 12,500 USD per such event. Organisations may also fund international participants from Southeast Asian Lower-Middle Income Countries (LMICs), who are not fully or partially funded under a SEA DREAM grant, to join such events.

3. What we expect of researchers funded on our grants

We expect people funded on our grants to:

• complete induction and regular refresher training
• take responsibility for undertaking CPD regardless of their career stage
• keep up to date with changes in legislation, regulations and practice relevant to their work
• complete the appropriate leadership and development training to support and develop their team, where they are leaders/managers
• where they are leaders/managers, provide support to their research team through:
  • mentorship
  • promoting and giving their team time for opportunities for their training and professional development
  • building time for this into research plans from application stage

We encourage researchers to take opportunities to develop as a potential leader in research, for example through mentoring (giving and receiving), network building, or volunteering in partner organisations in the private, public or civil society sectors.

4. What we expect of organisations who hold our grants

Organisations must support project-specific skills training and career-based continuing professional development of all SEA DREAM-funded researchers, including professional development of research support staff by:

• providing and funding CPD opportunities
• giving them the required time to undertake CPD based on the organisation’s policy, in addition to project-specific skills training
• encouraging researchers to build time for CPD into research plans from application stage
• actively promoting CPD as important and valuable within the organisation
• providing mandatory training on the handling of bullying and harassment or research misconduct investigations, including appeals, to panel members involved in such investigations
• providing a system of onboarding, embedding and career planning when new starters join the organisation
• assessing professional and career development needs through an annual performance review process
• actively monitoring the uptake and effectiveness of CPD and training activities at both a participant and organisational level

CPD should be tailored to meet needs within an organisation and aligned to any relevant national guidance.