The Technician Commitment: Advancing a Positive Research Culture

‘Team STEAM**’ The Technician Commitment is helping Manchester Metropolitan University to develop an inclusive research culture across all discipline areas.

Dr Kate Dixon - Head of Technical Services 

At Manchester Metropolitan University we are proud supporters of The Technician Commitment.  We recognise our team of highly skilled technical staff are essential contributors to our University’s research success, student experience, and our student’s future employability.

We became signatories of the Technician Commitment in 2017 and have been active and enthusiastic members of the network ever since.

Writing the 24 and 36 month Technician Commitment plans presented an opportunity to raise the profile of the work technical staff do with our University Senior Leadership Team. With their support we have since been able to raise the profile of the contribution technical staff make in enabling the University’s education and research goals, but in particular, we have made impact by raising the visibility and recognition of the contributions technical staff make to our University’s research success. In doing so, we have been able to influence the development of an ‘inclusive research culture’ I like to call ‘Team STEAM’; a culture where all Technical Services staff who work to deliver research success across all discipline areas are seen and valued. Manchester Met is undergoing a period of transformational change with regard to research; we are doing more and better quality research than ever before with nearly half of all academic staff involved in high-quality and impactful research and Team STEAM make an essential contribution.

Manchester Met’s ambitious estate plan will deliver new state of the art research infrastructure in terms of new physical spaces, developing new core facilities supporting research and specifying new and innovative technologies to underpin research delivery. Manchester Met’s plan includes The School of Digital Arts, Manchester Institute of Sport and The Science and Engineering New Build. 

To make sure a technical voice is included within the design and delivery of the plan, and to build a truly inclusive research culture, we made some forward-facing pledges as part of our 2018 Technician Commitment 24 month plan. I am pleased to be able to report these pledges have been realised over the past 24 months and summarise relevant achievements as follows:

Visibility and Recognition; the University pledged to ensure technical staff were appropriately represented on relevant committees and included as valued members of any new building planning teams. As a result, technical staff are members of all relevant New Build Project Boards, Project Executive Groups and embedded within appropriate working groups for all new build projects. In addition, technicians are represented at the University Research and Knowledge Exchange Committee and are invited to co-create the next phases of the University Research Strategy.  We have developed and are implementing a fair attribution policy ensuring technical staff who have made meaningful contributions to research output are appropriately referenced as authors and co-authors on publications.

Career Development; 3 new research facing technical job role profiles have been developed at Manchester Metropolitan University. These new roles provide career opportunities for technical staff in all discipline areas as research funding is realised.

Skills Sustainability; we have been able to successfully utilise level 3 and in-house degree apprenticeships to develop staff as ‘lifelong learners’ and to retain specialist skills relevant to research within our teams.

**STEAM is an acronym and refers to Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics discipline areas.

The Technician Commitment at the University of Glasgow

Mohammad Ali Salik, Technician Commitment Co-ordinator

Since becoming a signatory of the Technician Commitment, the University of Glasgow has taken firm steps to embed the key themes of the Commitment. In this process, the Technician Commitment has had a major impact on advancing a positive research culture for the University’s technical community. The institutional actions to support the Technician Commitment are aligned to our initiatives to create a positive research environment, which is defined as one in which we: help each other to succeed; value and recognise different contributions; support the highest standards of rigour. These actions, which are overseen by the Lab for Academic Culture, led to a Guardian University Award for staff experience in 2020.

Since 2019, the University has held regular Research Integrity Workshops solely for technical staff. These workshops introduced Research Integrity to technical staff and explored the most relevant aspects of it to their role. The workshops helped identify some of the work already being done by the University’s technical staff supporting research culture at the University such as data handling and storage, authorship, and developing research profiles. Following on from the workshops, many research technicians interacted with the University’s Library to develop their ORCID records.

In addition, the University has adopted the CRediT taxonomy which ensures proper recognition of the contribution of technical staff on publications. Specialist technical staff have since held local workshops for sharing best practices on image manipulation, cell culture and other areas of their specialism as well as getting involved in local Research Data Handling workshops. Many technicians have since become Research Integrity Training Facilitators working alongside the University’s Research Office providing one-to-one sessions to postgraduate researchers to promote research culture and integrity. The attached infographic illustrates the role of technicians in research integrity.

In February 2020, the University of Glasgow in partnership with Wellcome Trust, held a Town-hall event to share and discuss findings of a survey describing what a better research culture looks like and formulating ideas on how that could be achieved. This was one of nine Wellcome Trust events held across the UK. Some of the University’s senior technical staff were present at the event and even hosted some of the discussion tables.

COVID-19 has adversely affected research across the University and beyond. The University’s technical staff played a vital role during this time to keep essential research and activities running. Many got involved in research trials related to COVID-19, whilst others volunteered to work at the University’s Lighthouse labs carrying out COVID-19 testing or supporting the lab operations.

Without the role technicians played, restarting research at campus would not have been possible. Things needed to be planned and structured in very different ways to which researchers were used to. Technical staff highlighted their competence by making the return to work process straightforward. Many worked closely with each other often sharing best practices and knowledge. They were part of workshops held for researchers to discuss different tools, technologies and methods to enable planning, staggered start of finish times and juggling research activities spread over the coming months. They also held workshops to identify and overcome specific challenges in undertaking certain activities. Technicians collaborated with academics to create risk assessments and then carried out these detailed risk assessments related to COVID-19 to ensure all researchers and staff were safe when at work.

As per the key themes of the Technician Commitment, the University is firmly committed to ensuring the contribution of technical staff is visible and fully recognised. As further proof that technicians are integral to research community, technical staff were eligible to apply to a university scheme to offset the differential impact of COVID-19 on research, and therefore offset any career detriment caused by lost productivity.

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