PERCAT Officer

Job Purpose

To provide support to the postdoctoral community within the colleges of Life and Environmental Sciences and Engineering and Physical Sciences. This includes responsibilities for developing and implementing a programme of training, events and networking opportunities and implementing and monitoring a system of academic mentoring and annual performance development review for early career and postdoctoral researchers

The need for this post has arisen to ensure that the Colleges of LES and EPS are employing best practice in support of the Concordat for the Career Development of Researchers (agreed by UK research funders and employers), the Vitae Researcher Development Framework (agreed by government and UK research funders) and the university’s own Concordat.

The post holder will be based in the LES Research Support Office.

Main Duties:
• To provide administrative support to the PERCAT (Postdoctoral/Early Career Researcher Career Development and Training) committee. This will require overall responsibility for planning the meetings, collating relevant paperwork, taking minutes and following up on any action points arising.
• Identify training and development needs of PERCAT community and work with the committee to develop relevant training events.
• Maintain the PERCAT website.
• Engage with colleagues in similar roles across the University to ensure sharing of best practice and opportunities for cross college events.
• Manage and monitor the system of academic mentoring and annual performance development review for the postdoctoral community in reference to best practice and in liaison with HR. This will require maintenance of a database of research staff, matching of mentors to researchers, notification and monitoring of the PDR timetable, provision of relevant documentation to staff and researchers and development of resources as appropriate.
• Disseminate information regarding induction, training, career development etc to the postdoctoral community as required.
• Develop further networks and clear communication channels with relevant internal and external stakeholders.
• Act as sole point of contact for LES and EPS postdoctoral researchers to resolve day to day problems.

Person Specification

• Good educational standard – degree-level desirable with high quality A-Levels preferred
• Proven experience of project and budget management, particularly in relation to event organisation
• Excellent organisational skills
• Excellent attention to detail and adherence to deadlines and ability to work calmly under pressure.
• Excellent interpersonal, verbal and communication skills and ability to communicate with a wide range of people at all levels as well as to write and speak clearly, concisely, and tactfully and in a grammatically correct manner
• Excellent team working and relationship building skills across a diverse population of administrative, managerial and academic colleagues.
• Ability to work confidentially with people at all levels within the organisation
• Strong ability to work calmly and effectively under pressure
• Able to use own initiative within area of expertise and to understand when matters should be referred
• Proven ability to learn quickly and / or understand HR matters
• Excellent IT skills across all core Microsoft Office products including Word, Powerpoint, and Excel as well as webpage creation and maintenance.
• Personal flexibility and commitment to task completion