Mentoring roles

• Academic supervisors are usually extremely busy.

• Supervisors are sometimes min-maxed to producing articles at the cost of other skills.

• This leads to a situation where the supervisor can’t provide all of the needed mentoring. Maybe they can give a great idea and write a good people, but not tell someone which tools to use to do it well.

What is a research engineer?

• Someone that works on making research work well, not simply focused on making the next academic level or getting more first author papers.

• So they have time and freedom to do useful mentoring.

• Thus, they are designed to help grow your research and can mentor in research processes.

• Common names: Staff Scientist, Laboratory manager, Research Software Engineer.

• Have time to co-work rather than just tell people what to do and wish good luck at it.

Research engineers to support your group

• But you can also hire people with the explicit purpose of supporting your other researchers, instead of someone with the goal of advancing their own career.

• HR may not allow this since they don’t fit in the hierarchy.

• You probably can’t do what is suggested here, but it’s something to think about.