by Hope Kent, Postdoctoral Research Assistant, Psychology
In January this year, in my first few weeks as a newly minted post-doc, I found myself staring rather blankly at the section of a fellowship application entitled ‘impact’. To me, impact is the process of translating your research into real-world change. But the prospect of writing a plan for how exactly I was going to do that, and provide evidence of the impact of my work, was massively daunting!
Policy@Exeter Development Programme
In an attempt to shed some light on what steps I should be taking to achieve some ‘impact’ with my work, I signed up to the Policy@Exeter development programme. It is a nine-week course, with two strands – ‘engage’ and ‘influence’. I took part in the ‘engage’ programme, which walked us through a variety of exercises to help us identify, approach, and (of course) engage with key stakeholders. The course is hybrid, with some sessions in-person, and some online which makes it nicely accessible.
The sessions were varied, and very well structured – sometimes presented by the Policy @ Exeter team, and sometimes presented by external organisations. I particularly enjoyed the session with the Institute for Government – I have always found the workings of our parliament very opaque and difficult to understand, and they did a great job at simplifying this and giving us some advice on influencing policymakers at times of political transition.
We tackled an exercise towards the beginning of the course where I was encouraged to think about what success would look like for me in my work – I could then work backwards and identify who the key stakeholders are, and then make a plan for how to reach them. For my work, which aims to tackle the over-representation of children with disabilities in the criminal justice system I identified three key workstreams – I wanted to reach policy-makers in Parliament and the Ministry of Justice, I wanted to reach practitioners who often lead ‘bottom-up’ change in how the justice system operates, and I wanted to reach the general public – because public perceptions of the criminal justice system so heavily influence political portfolios.
My Main Takeaways
The main learning that stood out to me is that impact is something you build up throughout the course of your career. It’s not something you do overnight but is something you work on for years – building connections with key policymakers, developing your reputation as a trusted researcher in the field, and responding to opportunities as and when they arise. This helped me to develop an impact plan for my grant application without the immobilising pressure that I must change the world immediately with this research plan! Instead, I could focus on a few key streams of dissemination to reach the key stakeholders who are most likely to be interested and act on my findings – whom I identified through the exercises on the programme.
Additionally, I really enjoyed meeting other researchers at similar career stages who were facing the same questions – we were able to share ideas constructively, hear about each other’s research (which is always interesting!) and do some gentle networking (a term that always makes me shudder, but I actually found it very bearable in this context!).
Overall, if you are an ECR with the same feeling of overwhelm at the mysterious metric of ‘impact’ – I really recommend this programme!