Horizon Europe Project

CARDEA - Career Acknowledgement for Research (Managers) Delivering for the European Area

Context

Research managers and research support staff make a valuable yet undervalued contribution to Europe’s research excellence, unfortunately, there is a fundamental lack of understanding of European Research Manager profiles, including role characteristics, demographics and career pathways. The profession is almost invisible from a policy, career development and career trajectory perspective compared to a Principal Investigator. 

Additionally, there is little consistency across Europe in salary scales, contracts, skills, competencies, and training opportunities for Research Managers. Finally, Research Manager positions are often tied to individual grants leaving Research Managers often on precarious contracts throughout their careers. Despite this, Research Managers play a key role in administering research activities and valorising a range of hidden research outputs.

Research Manager is a relatively young career profile, but their importance is likely to increase in the next 20-30 years as we tackle more complex problems than ever. These problems require a depth of technical specificity provided by researchers and breadth of visibility, application, and exploitation of results.

 Research managers are ideally placed to develop such range but require structural supports to achieve this. The EU is ideally placed to take a leading role in this development as 22.2% of the world’s best researchers are residents in Europe.

 We believe the European Commission funding, through the Horizon Europe programme, marks the single largest investment in a research project that supports Human Resources Research initiatives in Ireland.

If you would like to be kept informed about the progress of CARDEA and contribute to the programme, please email us at cardea@ucc.ie to register your interest. 

Photos from CARDEA Kick-off meeting 03/06/2022 at University College Cork.