Future for the Future Leaders is now, Dr Niina Kolehmainen

Future for the Future Leaders is now, Dr Niina Kolhmainen NIHR Newcastle PSRC Academic Career Development Co Lead.

 

14^th March was the Academic Career Development (ACD) Forum in London, for all the ACD leads and the theme for the day was ‘research culture’. Representing the Newcastle PSRC, we headed down. It was our first such day. We’d put our training community’s video forward for sharing as a message from our community. And we were ready to learn all things great and mighty – directly from the NIHR Academy!

 

The usual train cancellations aside, we arrived relatively organised and alert. We found ourselves positioned at different tables, which was good as we got to create new links. We heard about some of the newer Academy schemes, were given feedback from the Postdoctoral event and listened to presentations on how we can develop and nurture a diverse research culture. We shared our community’s video and received some great feedback, which we will relay to our fellows (they did all the hard work on this) (Newcastle PSRC Academic Career Development Community Video). We had some lunch, swopped notes with colleagues old and newand made plans on how we can all be more collaborative. And then it was time to head home.

 

Our main learning from the day didn’t really hit us until on the train home, when we had a good 3 hours to unpack what we had heard, and to reflect on what it all meant for our Newcastle PSRC, and our wider Newcastle Health Innovation Partners’ Academy. And the more we reflected, the more we realised the substantial change that is in the horizon.

 

The times are changing. The next 5-10 years will see the stepping down of a whole generation of “training people”. Those of us who have lived and breathed training, career development and capacity building for the past 15-20+ years. Those who coined the term training lead, who came up with the idea of NIHR Academy, and who set up how we do things now. Those of us who have helped lead  the implementation across regions.

 

At the same time, the hugely positive shift - from historical hierarchies to much more multidimensional points of differences and richness of perspectives - is now, fortunately, looking inevitable. Not the least made so by the healthy refusal of the next generations of leaders to bow to such hierarchies but, instead, actively challenge us all to enact a more open, broad culture - for everyone.

 

But what does all this mean? I think it means: the future for the future leaders is now. If we have done our job of the past 15 years well, then the future is bright.