UPEN has a strong focus on supporting members with their continuing professional development. The network helps to bring colleagues together as part of a broad and supportive community of knowledge brokers and policy engagement professionals.
UPEN’s Voice your Vision event
As part of UPEN’s ongoing series of professional development events, I hosted the online Voice your Vision workshop in June 2024. The event attracted nearly 40 attendees and generated a lively discussion centred around two central questions:
1. What are the key skills for you as a knowledge broker?
2. How could UPEN help you to develop these skills?
During an initial brainstorm, participants suggested a large range of skills that knowledge brokers draw upon in their everyday practice. These ranged from technical skills, such as the use of social media or data analysis, to knowledge and its implementation, such as the importance of understanding institutional processes and the wider research funding landscape.
‘Soft’ skills and boundary-spanning
Whether it’s framed as convening, capacity and capability development, or providing headspace, knowledge brokers all work to give researchers and policymakers the time, space and permission to consider the wicked problems which we would all like to be solved.
As a result, participants in the workshop highlighted transferrable or ‘soft’ skills as being particularly key to their roles. Colleagues mentioned the need to develop expertise in areas such as negotiation, adaptability, problem-solving, professional curiosity and relationship-building, to name but a few.
Key knowledge broker skills
The group went on to identify three top skills that are particularly valuable for knowledge brokers:
- Impact tracking
- Stakeholder mapping and identification, and
- Effective networking skills.
These skills reflect the boundary-spanning nature of the sector. Knowledge brokers are constantly working to draw together people working at different career levels, in different institutional units, and from different organisations and professional fields. We also become experts in navigating complex policy dynamics, as well as balancing differing stakeholder demands across the research-policy ecosystem.
This type of boundary-spanning activity often involves stepping into others’ shoes. Knowledge brokers need to consider people’s feeling about a problem’s causes and potential solutions, as well as their motivations, beliefs and attitudes towards the use of evidence.
A plurality of experience
At the same time, while we need a broad range of skills and expertise to be able to perform our jobs, there is no clear path towards becoming a knowledge broker.
The field of knowledge mobilisation encompasses a diverse set of professionals with a huge range of backgrounds, experiences and career trajectories. We often also have multiple identities as producers, sharers and users of evidence.
By building on this existing expertise, we can further develop our professional skills through on-the-job learning and peer-to-peer collaboration alongside more formalised training.
How can UPEN help?
The popular UPEN mentoring scheme is now in its second year, offering the opportunity for colleagues at different stages of their career to share their insights and experience.
Workshop participants were keen to extend this peer-learning approach when looking to develop the key skills highlighted above: they suggested approaches such as best practice sharing, expert presentations by UPEN members, and the development of a database of practice examples and toolkits.
Looking to the future
The UPEN Professional Development Subcommittee is currently developing a new suite of training sessions and tools that speak to the points raised in the Voice your Vision session.
We very much welcome additional suggestions and comments on the future UPEN training provision. If you’d like to join the discussion, please do get in touch!
