OSCAR: A project to promote sustainable careers - MCAA Magazine February 2023

As researchers, facing the unknown is part of our career management. But the way we experience it could change if we get the chance to pursue mentorship and career development training. The OSCAR project, promoted by the MCAA and several partners, developed an online training platform and an online mentoring program to support researchers in their career management.

OSCAR stands for “Online, open learning recommendations and mentoring towards Sustainable research CAReers.” The OSCAR project aims to aid the professional development of researchers, such as Masters students or doctoral researchers, by providing personalized training on mental health and career development.

The project started in 2020 as an Erasmus+ strategic partnership, and it involves the Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and University Library, as the project coordinator, and the University of Siegen, RUMO, SciLInk Foundation, CALP, and the Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA) as members of the project consortium.

To maintain sustainable and successful academic careers, researchers and scientists need to attain interdisciplinary and cross-cutting skills beyond their specialization. They need to manage their own careers within and outside of academia, as well as handle stressful steps in their research projects, while maintaining a high level of mental wellbeing and motivation to deliver high-quality research output.

The OSCAR project is addressing those needs based on the expertise of the consortium, developing, deploying, and validating personalized training and online mentoring services for researchers to support their career management and mental health.

The project focuses on the development of an online, AI-powered, open learning recommendation framework and platform to support the improvement of key transversal skills of an individual level, taking into account the learner’s context.

The platform, called eDoer, is online and ready for the researchers to explore and use it to develop new skills that will help them to succeed in their careers and deliver high quality results. At the moment, it is available as a website, however a phone app is being developed to grant more available tools for the researchers. In addition to the platform, an online mentoring program is being developed that focuses on the mental health of the researchers. This will provide psychological support to understand and mitigate the impact of stressful academic environments.

As a partner, the MCAA has been involved in the support and testing of the online platform, ensuring a user-friendly web-portal with high quality output. Additionally, the MCAA is also involved in the platform content creation and curation and will be supporting the online mentoring program.

The lack of training related with career management can have an impact on the researchers personal and professional development, therefore, the OSCAR consortium will also work in the development of an online mentoring program in career management and planning in order to support researcher’s careers.

This strategic partnership, which runs until August 2023, will contribute to sustainable and successful careers of researchers. The project not only gives the tools to help the researchers in their career management, but also an online platform that can continuously provide transferable skills training and recognition.

Ana R. Santa-Maria
MCAA member
University of Harvard, USA
anaraquel.santamaria@hotmail.com
ORCID 0000-0003-3505-5477

Gábor Kismihók
MCAA member
Leibniz Information Centre
for Science and Technology,
Germany
gabor.kismihok@tib.eu
ORCID 0000-0003-3758-5455