Research agencies should provide funding for junior academics to develop their careers and leadership skills and head their own research teams, a report from the League of European Research Universities has suggested.

The study, , argues that providing junior researchers with more independence early in their careers would improve job security and provide them with the experience and skills to advance their research career ¨C either within or outside academia.

It says that research funding bodies should ¡°ensure that funding schemes supporting the employment of early-career researchers fund both research work and researcher development¡±. The latter could include ¡°scope for developing their own independent research ideas¡± and would allow them to ¡°gain further skills apart from the research itself¡±, from activities such as participating in conferences, making poster presentations and taking courses.

Funding agencies should allow ¡°part of a research grant¡± to be used to ¡°let researchers be temporarily employed on a project to prepare themselves for their further career¡±, it adds.

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The report also suggests that research agencies should offer schemes where a postdoctoral researcher can be the principal investigator for a grant project and lead a ¡°small research group¡±.

Universities should provide allow doctoral and postdoctoral researchers to spend about 10?days a year focusing?on ¡°personal and career development activities that do not relate solely to current research capability¡±, it adds.

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Jan van der Boon, director of administration at Leiden University and lead author of the report, said that these recommendations were among a series of suggestions that aimed to help ¡°young researchers have better possibilities to be independent at an earlier stage¡± of their career and ¡°make the transfer between universities and other employment sectors better¡±.

Mr van der Boon, who is a steering group member of the Leru research careers group, added that the paper¡¯s aim was to ¡°get away from the doom and gloom¡± about the poor employment prospects in research and show that ¡°career prospects are good if you take into account all kinds of trajectories [researchers] can follow in academia and outside academia¡±.

¡°But universities have to prepare researchers better for careers, and researchers themselves have to open themselves more to other opportunities,¡± he said.

ellie.bothwell@timeshighereducation.com