Professional Skills Training

Communication

Communication is a major task in science and relevant for all doctoral researchers since research results are rather useless if they are not known by others. Communicating in science ranges from writing articles in scientific journals, presenting talks and posters at conferences or meetings to informing the public and at least a PhD thesis has eventually to be written by everyone.

Courses in this category include academic writing, preparing posters and presentation slides as well as voice training to name a few.

Management

A PhD thesis can be considered as a project and many third party funded research activities are organized as projects as well. In addition, many doctoral researchers have more tasks than just doing their own research, e.g. they are supervising the research of bachelor and master students. Thus, management skills are useful already during the doctorate.

Management skills often become even more important for the future career in academia and especially in industry.

Courses in this category range from time- and self-management to project management.

Good Scientific Practice / Research Ethics

Obeying the rules of Good Scientific Practice is an absolute must for each scientist. But what exactly are those rules, what are the responsibilities of a doctoral researcher, which conflicts can one encounter during a doctorate and how should one react when noticing violations of those rules? Answers to these and other related questions can be found in Good Scientific Practice / Research Ethics courses.

Research Data Management

Another important issue to perform reliable research is Research Data Management (RDM). Thus, RDM courses are also categorized as Good Scientific Practice in the GS-EES Qualification Program. Teaching of RDM in the GS-EES goes beyond the aim to comply with guidelines for safeguarding good research practice. In close collaboration with the RDM activities of the Cluster of Excellence POLiS we also seek to unlock additional scientific value through systematic data handling and widespread data reuse across our research community. We offer workshops instructing how to make best use of Kadi4Mat, which is developed at KIT and integrates an electronic lab notebook (ELN), a robust repository, and advanced data analysis tools.

Equal Opportunities / Diversity / Mentorship

The group of doctoral researchers is diverse in terms of gender, social and cultural background, nationality, etc.. Courses in the category Equal Opportunities / Diversity / Mentorship aim at supporting and empowering each individual doctoral researcher during their doctorate and to prepare steps for the future career. In addition, we aim at improving the collaboration between the diverse group of scientists.

Courses include intercultural trainings, workshops on unconscious biases, workshops on career planning and application processes and more.

To emphasize the importance of this category, the GS-EES Qualification Program demands to gather a minimum of 1 credit point.

How & where to find courses

The GS-EES offers specific workshops covering all categories of the Professional Skills Training. A focus is on those categories which require mandatory credits, i.e. Good Scientific Practice / Research Ethics and Equal Opportunities / Diversity / Mentorship.

In addition, a broad variety of courses is offered by the respective institutions of our home universities responsible for supporting and promoting young researchers. These are

• the Graduate & Professional Training Center (ProTrainU) at Ulm University
• the Karlsruhe House of Young Scientists (KHYS) at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
• the Giessen Graduate Center for Natural Sciences and Psychology (GGN) at Justus Liebig University Giessen (JLU)

Participation in such courses is credited towards the GS-EES Qualification Program.

Workshop offerings of our home universities

• ProTrainU at Ulm University
• KHYS at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
• GGN at Justus Liebig University Giessen