good afternoon everyone and welcome to this new seminar.
as you know these seminars are going to be recorded,
so we inform you that the session is going to be recorded.
we ask you to please put on the mosaic speaking view so that you can
follow the people who are intervening adequately
we start after two minutes past four o'clock and with eighty-eight attendees, Vice Rector
Ignacio Aedo has the floor.
thank you Lorena just to
not more than 15
welcome you to this fifth seminar keeping the number of people more or less than other seminars, this fifth seminar is focused on
how to attract and retain the best talent and in particular
within the hrs4r logo, the OTM-R policies.
we have three parts within this seminar, the first one
will be a conversation with Salustiano
Mato who is vice-president of CRUE, then
we will have an intervention between Carmen Martín director of
Human Resources and Organisation and myself about the strategy of the university
on the human resources policy and the faculty. and finally
we will have a discussion panel to talk about OTM-R policies.
First of all, I would also like to apologise
on behalf of Pablo Serrano who is the vice-rector of the Pompeu
Fabra University and who will be arriving a little bit later.
He will be joining us in the middle of the session and he has asked us to excuse him, of course,
as he is participating, the least we can do is to excuse him, even if he joins us
later, so Lorena, I give you the floor, thank you very much, and
then I will introduce Alberto Iglesias who will conduct an
entertaining interview with Salustiano Mato
thank you very much Lorena and thank you very much to all those who attended
this event, almost a hundred people as you said,
which shows the interest in this subject. in the end we have a challenge
both in attracting and retaining talent and not only that
but also in the management of this research talent
in Spanish universities.and I think that there is no better person
to talk about this challenge than Salustiano Mato, as you said,
Deputy Vice-President of CRUE Salustiano Mato.
a very good afternoon to all of you I am delighted to have you
here and I wanted to start asking you questions because I think we should
start with the basics, which is the definition of a researcher's professional
career. in the end, the professional career in Spain
has always been a bit complicated, with more
uncertainties than certainties. I don't know how you see this issue, which
in the end is, let's say, the basis for everything else
Indeed, in order to be able to adequately
attract and retain talent in Spain, what we need to be clear about is
to have a clearly defined scientific career
without uncertainties and therefore with certainties.
This career is being built step by step, link by link,
and it still suffers from a major problem, which is,
to put it colloquially, the law of the funnel:
in the first stages, many people enter, and in the consolidation stage,
the exit is very narrow. if we want a
modern science and technology system and a perfect recruitment of
human resources, obviously, once you enter
the scientific career system, you should be
guaranteed that if you fulfil, so to speak, the duties
and meet the standards of the work you have to do
and the productivity you have to have in different periods,
you should be able to progress along this path. So the
scientific career begins with pre-election contracts,
and from CRUE there was a struggle for precisely what were still called
grants in the 1990s, they began to become
contracts, firstly at the initiative of the universities,
then by law when the formulation of contracts reached the FPI grants.
and from this century onwards, fortunately,
all posts and all grants
have been formalised as contracts. This is
fundamental for them to have a decent salary
and employment cover, therefore, from pre-doctoral contracts
we have to move on to post-doctoral contracts, here in Spain
there was a tremendous gap because they were not available and even so
there is a tremendous deficit in the supply of the second
phase, which is when they receive their thesis training,
which they should have postdoc training, fundamentally in reference
centres to achieve a high level of specialisation after
their doctorate, which will allow the talent you
are investing in to return in the third phase contracts,
which would be those of reincorporation. So
let's say that the first time that postdoc contracts
were no longer grants and were not contracts was in Galicia
when I had the opportunity to be director general of the Xunta
de Galicia and define scientific policy in
Galicia in those years, the first postdoc contracts
were created which were called Ángeles Alvariño and which gave rise
to the existing modality in Spain, which is Juan de la Cierva
that does not yet have the natural link or linkage
it should have in order to build a second career step.
and then the reincorporation contracts, which are the best known,
are the Ramón y Cajal contracts, and now there are other modalities that have
to do with European aid that can serve as a platform or
format for reincorporation contracts, which we had a
hard time implementing. This was one of the first actions
taken by the CRUE R&D sector when it was created
in 1998, at that time I was vice-rector
for research, the sector was created and
one of the first actions over those two years was to define
a system for attracting and recapturing talent, which
later came to be called Ramón y Cajal, the Ramón y Cajal call for applications
and then, obviously, after these three steps: pre-doctoral
, post-doctoral and free incorporation contracts,
there has to be a process of accreditation for consolidation.
This would be a real interior tac
but, what faults does this interior tac have? Fortunately, we have
managed to install at least contractual figures in these
phases, but they are not linked or well coordinated because
the big problem is not to create a funnel. what we
have to do is to determine exactly in the selection process
what we are capable of or what we need so that it does not depend
on the number of posts, let's say for consolidation in
the last phase of consolidation, so that the corset
of the positions does not depend on the number of positions, let's say the passage to consolidation
of all the researchers who have gone through this chain of
contracts. this is crucial therefore,
the ideal would be for us to have a scenario without uncertainties
and with certainties from the pre-doctoral contracts, I would say
that as far as possible with adequate investment, it would be at least
to ensure it from the postdoc contracts, that is, with the
young doctors who get a postdoc contract and
what would be real or more possible now with
a firm commitment in the short term would be, at least,
for us to have certainties and not have the funnel from the
incorporation phase. but looking at the objective and from CRUE we say,
we have to look at the objective from the beginning, from the pre-doctoral
contracts that this scenario exists, this is absolutely
fundamental and it can be done. The truth is that we are the government,
but we are trying to convince the government to do it.
Fortunately, over the last thirty years, the university movement
has managed to create these figures that have allowed
human resources to enter academia through
the current law and the current framework,
and also through the scientific career. not only for teaching
needs, and this is gradually coming together,
which means that if there is a firm commitment to the
current law, all of this could be done. what is needed, more
money, more capacity for the universities, no
replacement rates and a whole series of things that we are calling for
to be eliminated. Obviously, we need to size up
the number of staff we need And a second fundamental issue
for attracting and retaining talent is that scientific careers
should not only be directed, as a final point, to university chairs,
to the academic teaching career,
and not all those we train should be PIs
of large research groups because otherwise we would have,
and this is what is happening to us, a lot of heads
and no scientific mass to develop
these work teams. that's why we have a deficit in
Spain - well, I personally tried, but we couldn't govern
for long enough to consolidate it in Galicia - is a career in
human resources for research with a more technical profile
and more support for research groups. and here we had
defined, and I think we should also define, an itinerary
with certainty, training contracts with a four-year
period, incorporation contracts with a period of two to four
years and then an accreditation process to consolidate them
into permanent public
employee positions. which can go through the employment route, in this
case according to the current law, and which can go through the civil service route
with the law of scales, which is more complicated, but we have these
routes and there can be three scales, the professional training levels,
the graduate levels and the doctorate levels.
We need all these types of figures
in the research teams to create critical mass
and complete the teams, not just university professors.
yes, the visible head that there are also those people who support
the teams in the first one there was a little bit of progress and there is still a lot
to do and in the second one everything is still to be done. so, the issue here
is that with the current law a lot of this can already be done but
we want to change the law so that it can be made easier,
more flexible and clearer. And there is another aspect that you mentioned
in passing, which is the attraction and retention of talent, because of course,
it is one thing to define the professional career and give them the opportunity
to develop fully in academia, but of course we have a previous problem,
which is to find these researchers.We train very valuable
people who in many cases end up going to work outside
Spain. We all know that according to UNESCO in 2019 we were
28th in the number of researchers per inhabitant
with 2,944 if I am not mistaken, in other words, we have a
problem apart from bureaucratic issues and all the issues you have mentioned
of political will, we also have a problem in attracting these researchers,
so that they stay here and do research in Spanish universities.
How can we manage to attract them, to attract them, because Spanish
science can be a really powerful driving force and something interesting
for your professional career? well, precisely the first condition
to be attractive and to convince talent,
to get it back or to attract external talent and take advantage
of the talent that other countries have developed.
well, the first thing to do is to have this well defined because that way the people
who come here know where they are at the moment and how they
can progress, how they can walk, you have to make like a Metro map
and it has to be very clear where they have to go when they get
into each vehicle. but secondly, once we are
clear about that, because now we can offer some of this but it is still very undefined,
but the second thing is to really create
attractive bets and projects and what we had
begun because people are more moved by
interesting projects by scientific challenges.
and that they are well supported and that there is a strategic
in the destination university in the destination area and obviously
if you manage to have strategic
commitments in which that talent is important
or can be and is enthusiastic about the challenge and the answer to the questions you ask
them or the problems you pose them. then comes the
third derivative, which is to find a suitable environment, that is to say,
ok, I am interested in this but I want to go there and I have
what material and human resources and what kind of life
I have there, in other words, what standard of living I have there. and there we can
offer magnificent places and marvellous valleys
of innovation. and here in Spain we have to make a
transition of the campuses, we are starting to do it, we want to do it now
in CRUE we have proposed a macro project that we call transforming
the campuses to transform society to participate in
the economic recovery plan, this has already led to
a couple of measures, energy efficiency and
a distribution of money to attract talent precisely with the
ministry that has come to the universities, it is one of the
shock measures. but the idea is to achieve,
beyond those campuses of excellence that we began to draw up
and that we have continued to support, is to become the driving force behind
the knowledge society because we are
a fundamental element, because we are the generators
of knowledge. and therefore we have to move towards knowledge-intensive communities
and therefore, if you are committed to knowledge,
that climate will be bought by many researchers. so,
one, like the laws of robotics, one, a well-defined and
complete scientific and academic career, a well-defined
and complete technical career. secondly, an active project and questions that challenge
and seduce researchers around the world,
thirdly, an ecosystem that offers them
the quality and possibility of doing everything you want to do
and, lastly, a quality of life in
the environment. That is what we have to put together, it may be
chimerical but, if we were clear about it or if our politicians
were clear about it, we would move in that direction and although it may take us a while
to get there, we would take steps, as has been done on some occasions
and that is why there are some of these figures, although they are sometimes badly
connected and poorly dimensioned. and above all
they are not yet a solution of continuity with each other, but
they are a bit discontinuous, which is what worries
researchers. and lastly, precisely if you do some
of this, you would already have a definition of a scientific
career that is not so long, in other words, someone would not have to wait
until they are almost fifty or forty years old, as now on average, to reach
a situation that, in the end you never reach, because I never reach
and I am a veteran, but even if you do not reach the end, you will reach a consolidated situation.
and in fact you have touched on another issue that is quite important
which is, you are, the academy is the generator of knowledge,
and we are always thinking about this professional career from the
perspective of the researcher, of the teaching and research staff, of those who manage these large projects in the academy, but there is another part which is the transfer of this knowledge to the private company,
which is where we are talking about all the issues of creating jobs
from the universities. but there is always the eternal debate,
researchers in many cases receive, as we know in their
professional career, part of these promotions and the career to
become full-professors depends on the creation of papers, but not on creating companies, not on creating
value for the market with this knowledge from the academy.
how we could combine this interest and also many
researchers who might be interested in having a duality between researcher, academia
and business. Well, in CRUE we shared this reflection a few years ago
and we considered that we were missing an important
aspect that had to be done through the
prestige of the activity. Therefore, the pending issue with knowledge
transfer is precisely that it is recognised and that excellent knowledge and transfer activity
is recognised, as well as, knowledge of excellent scientific
activity is through the highly cited
papers that are necessary at world level, which we can make
the analogy that with this we transfer our knowledge to the
world and we are a beacon that guides the world, to the extent
that we are more cited or that we have more impact with our
publications, we have to do the same with the transfer of knowledge
the difficult thing to do this with knowledge transfer was to clearly
define knowledge transfer, to clearly broaden the concept of knowledge transfer and
and the CRUE started to do this
carried the work forward, in fact, I was
lucky that my fellow rectors proposed me to
coordinate and direct this study and this study, this report that was published at the end of the
2018, gave rise to a new incentive that is
the six-year transfer period and that from CRUE we ask and after the pilot
experience that has been done, we ask that the six-year research period created almost 60 years ago
it is fundamental the fact that Spain is the most profitable and efficient country
in the world in terms of scientific production, ahead of
Australia and the United States, and this is
easy to see from any international ratio,
if we divide it by the GDP of each country, Spain is the first
and the money invested in R&D is much lower.
this has been done in recognition of the individual
scientific work and the prestige that researchers are given by doing
the six-year transfer period, and that is why we want and we ask the
ministry to consolidate it, the ministry is in favour, is
with us, is convinced, and now things are at a standstill
due to the discussions they have with the Treasury, the
money issues, but in any case, what is going to happen?
if the six-year research period has brought about an evolution
in the capacity of our system to produce excellent science, the six-year transfer period
is going to bring about a revolutionary and complete change in how to
create a curriculum because, no more and no less, it means that you can
cover the stages of the scientific career and reach
the end, the Chair, also through excellent transfer activities,
not only through papers and
and obviously this is a fundamental element because this is going to
make it possible that, let's say, everything we are doing in terms of
transfer, we don't know any recognition other than the
knowledge we have. if the element of money is recognised, it is one more element
of recognition of the work, of prestige that allows you
to visualise what the researcher is really looking for,
that in some way what he does is
respected by his colleagues and respected
by the academy. We are taking this step and the truth
is that we have carried out the pilot experience and after the
calibration we are in a position to make a new call for applications
for six-year transfer awards and therefore for the evaluation of the
transfer, as another element for the scientific career
and the academic career of the university faculty that can now be
consolidated. once the indicators have been calibrated,
we are in a position to leave them, let's say, after a clearer
and better defined trial. so, here are your requests, these calls
for attention. I will keep your two points, the threading together of
all the initiatives that are already being carried out, the whole of this professional career
, those small steps we have already taken in some fields, to really unite
them all in a strategy that favours the professional career
of the researcher and we will also keep this request for
the six-year transfer period as a way of helping this other part
of the process. Thank you very much Alustiano for your time,
Lorena, I leave you, I am sure you are going to discuss many of the issues
that Salustiano has commented on during the rest of the afternoon
Thank you very much Alberto and thank you very much Salustiano for, as always, your scientific
lucidity and your ability to lead the way.
let's move on to the next block, which is an
informal conversation, but I think it will also be
very entertaining between Ignacio Aedo, vice-rector of faculty
at the Carlos III University of Madrid and Carmen Martín
Romo, director of human resources at the university, go ahead.
thank you very much Lorena, first of all I would like to thank Salustiano and
Alberto for the interview that has been carried out previously because
it has been very interesting. in a short time, in this
conversation that Carmen Martín Romo and I want to share, she
as director of human resources and organisation and
I as vice-rector of faculty, what we want is to try to
explain why this human resources strategy for the
faculty in our university was born. so,
this whole series of seminars is part of the European HRS4R human resources
strategy for researchers project that helps us to
define a strategy for the faculty.
and when we launched the project, I'm talking about May 2016
approximately and we received the reply from the
European Union at the end of 2016 and the beginning of 2017 they said
to us, but what is your strategy? so we looked back and said, I think we need
to outline a human resources strategy for the faculty.
excuse me Nacho and what were the starting points to make
that outline that you are referring to there were basically two, the
first is our university and secondly the principles
that are internationally recognised in the field of
attracting and recruiting talent. when we talk about our university,
our university's mission is to contribute to the improvement of society
through student-centred quality teaching and advanced
research in accordance with demanding international criteria.
but in order to develop this mission, different tools have
been defined, such as the strategic plan,
the plan to achieve the sustainable development objectives
and the codes of good practice in research. but
even more, we have a set of values that identify our university
such as capacity, efficiency, equity, merit, transparency and
respect for the environment and that, in the end, are going to be reflected in
the people who make up our institution through their
commitments and actions. Therefore, when people
act, when they participate, they are giving value
to these types of values that the university wants to transmit and
we have to give these people continuous personal and professional support.
from the point of view of internationally
recognised principles, the first thing we have to take into account
is the European researcher's mantle and the code of conduct
for the recruitment of researchers, what we usually
call the chapter & code. not only these principles but we also have to
take into account the European principles for open, transparent and merit-based
recruitment OTM-R and not only that
but also the European frameworks that are being built together with
our partners the four u, Yufe, Yerum, etc. and also what is being
done internationally in our neighbouring countries and in
prestigious universities that are also close to us.
but Carmen, these are the two starting points, what does the human
resources strategy for the faculty really consist of? well, look Nacho,
as you will remember, when we were in the process of designing
the human resources strategy for the faculty
we often looked at the structure of our strategic plan
and we decided that we were going to follow a similar structure to that
of our plan. the plan, remember, is configured
around four strategic axes, research, education,
relations with society and good governance.
well, we thought that the axes on which our human resources
strategy for the faculty should be based were going to be those that we have
seen in the previous strategy drawing and which I remember
are the commitment to best practice and ethical principles,
transparent open recruitment based on
merit and ability, working conditions and career development,
emphasis on training and development as well as
communication and participation. and does
this order mean anything? no, far from it, all the axes
we have just mentioned must have the same weight within
our human resources strategy And how can the university
benefit from this strategy? well, I believe without
a doubt that the first thing in a well-designed strategy,
as I believe we have, is that it gives value to the organisation, it also
defines the mission and priorities of the human resources function
and therefore sets the fundamental objectives
for human resources. in the end, everything that enhances the
human capital of an organisation will benefit its
final management. And are there benefits for the faculty,
for the people who make up the faculty?There are undoubtedly two that come to mind
that seem to me to be extremely fundamental. The first is
that a good strategy achieves, and I believe that ours does,
more committed employees, and this clearly has
a series of benefits, including greater satisfaction,
higher productivity, talent retention or lower rotation,
loyalty, productivity, among others. But in addition, what it also
does is allow us to prepare and adapt staff to the new
demands of work, above all to new organisational models that
we are obliged to give, we have the very recent example of
COVID19 , which has meant that we have had to change our teaching model for the future
and I believe that this contributes significantly to this.
Well, we have left the strategic axes and we should
talk about it again.Well then, Nacho, if
you want to talk about recruitment, since this seminar is focused on
attracting and attracting talent. Well, and I think we have been working
continuously for a few years now to improve the recruitment processes.
clear and transparent recruitment and talent attraction policy,
we have increased, we have placed greater emphasis on advertising
the calls for applications, trying to ensure that they reach
as many people as possible who might be interested in them different
committees have been established, always with independent members,
we have assessed or we try to assess merits
qualitatively as well as quantitatively and we are starting to
recognise academic mobility both in
the public and private sector, that is, in conclusion,
what we try to do is to find the best possible match between
candidates and the positions for which we are incorporating
in the processes a combination of CV analysis
with those quantitative and qualitative elements we were
talking about before with competency tests and interviews
to make sure we hire the best people. Of course,
if you will excuse me Nacho, I would like to ask you about
the specific process of attracting talent, how important is this
term nowadays in our university?
attracting talent for any university is fundamental
and it is not a task that can be solved in two days,
we need to have flexible regulations, an agile rotation
capacity, new models for attracting human resources
that allow our departments to carry out a personnel policy
within the general principles that the university must establish.
The university is already committed to specific and generic programmes
launched by the university itself, such as
the CONEX and CONEX-Plus programmes, chairs of excellence,
post-doctoral stays and soon, as Salustiano mentioned,
we will be using the Ministry of Universities'
requalification programmes, in particular,
the María Zambrano, Margarita Salas and re-qualification programmes in which
we are going to try to overcome some of the barriers imposed in order to obtain
better staff for the Carlos III University and
try to have a positive impact on the human resources strategy,
always in line with the OTM-R and Charter and Co principles.
but Carmen I think our audience wants us to
go faster and I would at least like to say
what are the objectives of the rest of the strategic axes.
what do you think if we start with working conditions and professional
careers? so let's start with working conditions and career
where I would like to start by saying that
if the main asset we really have in this university
is its people, then obviously what we want to achieve
is an attractive, open and viable working environment
for all staff and for the faculty of course.
Well, then, what are the objectives, in summary,
what could we say are the fundamental objectives that we have established
within this axis of working conditions and professional careers?
the first of them will obviously be to plan the
professional career of the faculty Salustiano has spoken to us notably
about all of this content, and we also have it as a
priority axis. We are also trying to promote the mobility of
our teaching staff to institutions of recognised prestige.
we intend to stabilise employment and we know that we have barriers,
you were saying a while ago, of course we have barriers, we have a
replacement rate but we are not going to stop trying to
stabilise this employment so that as soon as the barriers
disappear we can make progress we also want to maintain a healthy
working environment for our people while encouraging the
development of digital transformation.
do you finish with another of the axes Nacho?Yes, well, if you think
training and development is another of the
fundamental axes within this strategy.
We have been working for a long time on the design of
training and professional development plans to promote improvement
at all stages of professional development and we have to
continue working to establish multidimensional training
plans that favour the continuous development of the faculty.
we are currently designing mentoring plans
so that, in the early years of a career,
people can be guided to decide on the best career
steps to take we are training
the entire faculty in digital transformation there is
an important effort within the teaching field but we want
to go further so that we do not forget other areas
where digitalisation is also important programmes have been developed
and established to encourage the motivation of the faculty
as well, one of the latest steps that is being taken
and which is also very strong is the whole area of language
programmes where we have clearly committed ourselves to promoting these
programmes and helping or facilitating the accreditation of teachers at
different levels in a foreign language. we cannot neglect the
commitment to best practices and ethical principles either,
Carmen, would you like to continue with this principle. let's go
with best practices and ethical principles, well, the first thing
to say and to remember is that our university is committed to
comply and of course to enforce all applicable regulations,
it could not be otherwise. Furthermore, our
university trusts in the work of its research ethics
committee and ensures compliance with the best
practices and ethical principles set out in the
different codes of ethics, whether national, international
or our own, which we establish in our own
university. is a university that I believe complies with the principles
of good governance because it takes care of the development
of its staff, because it consolidates transparency
with open data, because it improves the attraction of resources,
promotes the protection of equality, diversity and
inclusion and also develops alliances in a very global
environment. in addition to this, we have to take into account that
all of its tasks are part of the
20/30 agenda, integrating the SDGs into university
policies. it seems to me that time is running out and to finish, Nacho, I will leave you,
if you like, the last axis that is part of the human resources
strategythe last one is the most
transversal because from communication and participation
it touches all the other axes because in the end we have to
communicate and we have to make the people
involved in these processes participate. Therefore, the objectives
we have with this axis are, on the one hand, to get the
different groups of the faculty to participate in the definition of
the action plans in the different areas of action
and also, on the other hand, to establish communication
mechanisms that allow the strategies and specific action
plans that are being carried out to be made known. Carmen I think we have already
gone over time as usual and here it is important to say two things,
the first is that this strategy was approved in the last
governing council and is available on the website of the
logo where it appears as human resources strategy for
faculty and where it appears not only the strategy,
but also an annex for compliance with OTM-r a
open, transparent and merit-based recruitment and without further ado
we give the floor again to Lorena to move to the next section, thank you
i am in perfect, i believe that it has therefore been as very dynamic
congratulations let's go to the third and last block Eva
Herrero is the moderator of this round table which I prefer you
to introduce yourself, hello good afternoon to all of you. well, first of all,
thank you to the Vice-Rectorate for Facluty for
inviting me to moderate this panel, which I believe brings us closer to
an essential area for the faculty's
professional career. I am going to briefly introduce the speakers,
I have had to make a fairly extensive summary because
they all have extensive experience. Let's start with
Cecilia Cabello, she is currently Director of
Operations at the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology,
the Spanish representative in the NESTI bureu of the OECD and
Chair of the ERAT Human Resources and Mobility Committee of the
Council of Europe. Xavier Ariño is an advisor to the Curie Action strategy
where he has coordinated a talent
attraction project and
currently leads the strategic initiatives of the Autónoma
University of Barcelona and is head of the office
of the rector of the same university and finally Pablo Pareja
vice-rector of teaching staff at the Pompeu Fabra
University where he develops competencies for
attracting and retaining talent welcome to the three of you and
I think we will start with Cecilia who I think will give
us some general information on where this
OTM-R system comes from in the field of
human resources and she is going to give us the keys to understand
this system a little better, so go ahead Cecilia
thank you, thank you very much Eva and thank you for inviting me to participate
in this event, I don't know if you can hear me well,
I'm going to try to speak as loudly as possible.
Very briefly, in the year 2000, within the framework of the Lisbon Treaty,
the European Research and Innovation Area
was defined and this area defined a series of
priorities to strengthen the European Research
Area and the keys to strengthening the system.
One of them, one of the priorities is to
have a free market for researchers so that
knowledge can circulate so that people can circulate. This is the basis, then
later on, what we call the Hera roadmap emerges,
where it is said, ok, we have defined these priorities, in particular
the priority of the free market for researchers and it is decided
that we have to make a roadmap and define concrete actions
that cover this objective, that is, what we have to
do concretely at European level for
these actions and in this area it is decided that one of the
actions is precisely the recruitment based on open,
transparent and merit-based processes. So,
within this framework, it is decided that this is the roadmap and this is the priority
action and the human resources group, which at that time
depended on the European Commission and now depends on the Council,
decides that this has to be translated in some way, that is to say,
these actions have to be translated into how to make open recruitment
transparent and based on merit and translate this roadmap into
what they called the toolhead, an implementation procedure. then,
this working group, which is basically representatives
of the different member states, is entrusted with the task of defining what
the OTM-R is. in parallel to all this process there are many policies
that contribute to an open market for researchers and in
circulation there are other initiatives and other policies,
the framework of the different levels of researchers
R1, R2, R3 is defined, the policy is defined and while
in 2005 what we call the charter of conduct and
the charter & code that you know. in parallel with this initiative, it was decided
that in addition to adhering to these forty principles, it was necessary to
implement them with the strategy of the Carlos III
University. So, these two parallel processes come together
and the OTM-R tool kit or work tools are adapted
within the process, why? because in the end we see that
in the end it is necessary to have an open, transparent
and merit-based recruitment, to support the instructions, to ensure that
the best person is hired for that position and
conditions are attractive guarantees the equality of
that the conditions are attractive, guarantee equal opportunities and facilitate mobility
among the entire European scientific community, that is the idea. we also see that there is
a kind of difference between the perception of what
the instructions or the public administration have about this process,
most of them if you ask the administration or any institution,
yes, my processes comply with these OTM principles but
the researchers themselves are the ones who said; I don't think so, I think
we need to make an improvement and that is also why the context
of the tool kit, of the tool we have in our hands
In any case, we have to bear in mind that this
tool, this policy has to be linked to other
human resources policies, as we heard earlier from Carmen
and Ignacio, I think it is very important to have a global
human resources strategy package to, in general, favour the conditions
that researchers have and to attract talent and in general to
ensure that an institution can be able to attract talent.
then it has to be translated into implementation initiatives
and that's kind of the context in which all this has emerged
basically because there is a priority, there is a roadmap,
those properties, that roadmap, are translated into actions
and that means that the institutions then have to implement
the expressions obviously voluntarily and I hope I have
explained well but that is the context in which
the OTM-R arises and where the initiative is based.
Thank you very much Cecilia because it is indeed
complex but you have summarised it very well. I think that
the interesting thing now is to carry it out,
as you say in these initiatives that have been launched in the institutions.
I think it's good that both Xavier and Pablo are going
to talk to us specifically about their experience, we are going to hear
Xavier Ariño speak and find out a little about how this has been implemented
at the Autónoma University of Barcelona, for example to give us some more clues
about the fieldWell, good afternoon and it's a
pleasure to be there sharing this discussion panel with all of you.
The truth is that I really liked Cecilia's comment that
beyond the toolkit, this has to be reflected in the
strategy itself and in the policies of the institutions
because it is true, because in the end it seems that
the OTM-R is a list of little crosses of the duties
we have to do but never anything else, no
and I think that there should be a strong implication
in the institutional strategy itself, despite
the fact that having a tool kit is great to be able to monitor
the actions that you carry out and it serves as a guide to take
into account the actions that you have to carry out. In other words,
we do not underestimate the usefulness of this tool kit
in any case, but in any case I insisted that I think the concept goes much
further and affects the ownership of the strategy
in the institution in terms of human resources recruitment.
certainly because of my background in Euraxess implementation
and monitoring at my university I will be very
pragmatic in how we are implementing the OTM-R strategy.
we have basically carried out a process focused on
the analysis of the whole selection and recruitment process,
that is to say, the first step is to carry out an analysis and, based
on this analysis, a protocol or process to find the
profiles we want to select or recruit.
Once this analysis process has been carried out, the next step was to implement it
through a digital platform, the whole selection and
recruitment process is carried out online,
reducing to a minimum the documentation provided by
the candidates in order to avoid an excess of administrative
work and also facilitating the evaluations by the evaluators
and the selection board in the selection process.
in addition, this same platform, in an
almost automatic way, has an outlet
for the dissemination and communication of the call for applications.
basically on international portals, especially
the Euraxess portal.so, let's say, all the calls
for proposals follow a similar process,
It is important in this sense and it has also been one
of the difficulties that the whole process and all the documentation
of how all the contracting is done, all the
ways, everything is in English and this seems silly but I insist
that it has not been easy at all. this is also related to
a training process for all the technicians involved
in this process, so all the departmental managers
have a training process in contracting processes
but also the project managers so that they know that if they
want to initiate contracting processes in their projects, they have to
do it following this mechanism. the selection tribunals have been
modified, especially the most difficult ones, which were
the tribunals for project-based selection contracts,
and now it is compulsory for the tribunal
to include not only the PI, but also a member of the
human resources area with experience in selection processes
and a member of the trade unions or social agents
to guarantee the fairness of the process. In this sense,
the experience in other processes in international
projects such as the Marie Curie actions Cofund has been
very important because a programme with the level
of excellence and demands such as these cofund problems serves
as a pilot at an institutional level to implement policies and,
in some way, create examples that the researchers themselves
then understand that this is possibly the way forward
if we want to work well on the whole issue of attracting talent.
in any case, all the modalities of recruitment that are now
becoming more and more frequent, not only
for civil servants, but also for employees, the great opportunity we have
in universities to work on the traction and
retention of talent and above all to articulate,
this has come up before and for my fundamentals, the professional
career models within the institution.
thank you very much Xavier, but now Pablo, tell us a little bit about
the experience at your university good afternoon, welcome Good
afternoon Eva and thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to
share with you the experience of Pompeu
and also to learn from the experiences that Xavier
from the Autónoma and before Cecilia and other colleagues explained.
I will be very brief, let me explain a little about
the Pompeu case, I am going to be very practical and then in the
question and answer session or debate, if you want to expand on any aspect of it
first, I will put you in the context in which we find ourselves
at Pompeu when we decided to implement this OTM-R strategy
Pompeu has been working on this issue for
more or less ten eleven years and, as I suppose in other universities,
it has also been a process of trial and error,
with some mistakes we have made along the way.
and when it was time to implement this strategy we
were caught at a very particular moment, as some of you
probably know, Pompeu is a young university with
eight macro departments and a university in which
the departments are more important than the faculties, which
is atypical in the Spanish university system.
when we tried to implement the OTM-R strategy
we were at a time when we had sized up what we wanted to be like
as a university when we grew up, but when we
had not yet made all the recruitments to complete, let's say,
our teaching staff and our research staff When the
time came to implement the OTM-R strategy,
the famous replacement rate arrived, the limitations of
chapter one and this at Pompeu meant that every year,
and this is where my misfortune comes in, which I share with you,
every year Pompeu can only incorporate about ten,
fifteen researchers, that is, our positions are very limited.
And we have had to make a virtue of this necessity, which
has forced us to be especially meticulous when it comes to
implementing the OTM-r strategy, which is why in our case
we say there is a commitment and I could now boast
that Pompeu is firmly committed to this
strategy out of conviction, but it pains me to admit
that there is also a necessity, i.e. if we did not do this with eight or ten positions
per year, we would be destined to fail if we were not open,
transparent, especially competitive, and sought to promote
talent as much as possible. and I will emphasise four aspects
of what has been our strategy and what seems to me to have been good
practice the first element of our strategy
is that each of the departments of our university,
of the eight departments, has set up an international advisory
committee in which some of the university's
professors have also participated, which has been dedicated to defining
the strategic profiles that we needed as a university,
that is to say, it has tried to transcend the pressures that we all know are part
of the day-to-day work of a university in which the different departments
push to consolidate professors who have been there for a long time
and has tried to identify strategic opportunities, profiles for
the future, spaces that were opening up. for example these committees
, because when Brexit happens they say here is a window of
opportunity, in the UK many researchers are leaving,
perhaps we should launch a campaign to try to find
talent in these contexts. And these international scientific
committees, I must say, are going very well, because they have helped us
to escape a little from the daily logic that usually accompanies most
departments in universities. A second element that is
quite atypical and that is now included in the university
reform that the ministry was trying to promote is what we call
the Teniurtrac programme or the programme for attracting
and capturing talent. Five years ago, the Pompeu
Fabra University set up a programme that sought
to provide greater guarantees to researchers who wanted to
move to Barcelona or the Pompeu Fabra University to develop their professional
careers. This Teniurtrack programme, which in some cases
we have done in combination with banks or with private companies
that have helped us to co-finance these positions allow us
to offer salaries that are a little more competitive and above all,
because you know that in Spain this is highly regulated, but
above all they offer advantages that are not more attractive
in the eyes of some researchers. for example, if we take
someone from a certain field, they are offered the possibility of developing
a funded project or they are given, for example, a laboratory
that is paid for by this co-financed position, that is to say, it is not always
a salary for the researcher themselves but
working conditions that make our offer more attractive.
Then, as Xavier mentioned, a third axis
that has been fundamental for us has to do with the way we
have communicated these calls, we also do it through
Euraxess and two years ago we acquired, and this is not to advertise,
an Interfolio platform that allows us to do
all the processing online, as in the case of the Autonoma University,
we also do it in English and it has allowed us to go much
further than we have ever gone before. to give
you an idea, if for each of the Teniurtrac vacancies that
we were offering between 2016 and 2019
an average of forty, forty-five people
applied, since we have implemented Interfolio right now,
to our pride but also to our dismay,
sometimes around four hundred and eighty people
apply for each vacancy. which is a lot of work for us
when it comes to filtering, but for us it is a good indicator
that this commitment has made sense, as
Xavier and Cecilia said very well, it is accompanied by
greater transparency, streamlining procedures, minimising bureaucracy, that is,
there is no need to ask for standardised CVs with
a super specific format, ten thousand letters of recommendation,
copies of all publications because it is clear that a
good researcher, a good researcher if you subject them to this
punishment, probably the procedure, makes them not want to come
to the university, regardless of the conditions and conditions
and the last question that Cecilia pointed out and which for us is
something that, to finish with a bit of a purpose of amendment, is something
that we have to improve, we have tried and we are still working on
this, we have tried to link the different categories
R1, R2, R3 and R4, the different criteria
that go with each category with specific training
programmes for each of the categories that are also
linked to what is then their evaluation for progression,
in other words, when you are in the R2 category you are offered
a package, shall we say, of courses and training tools
that should then help you to pass the evaluation at the end of the
period in which that person should be R2
and move on to R3. in this, as I said, we have been running
the pilot test for about eight months now, the intention is to carry out the evaluation
in November of this year, but we believe that it was a necessary
complement that was perhaps the weakest part of our
strategy so far. I won't go on any longer, I would have
many reflections, some of them very critical of how we
have done it, but Eva seems to have left it for
the debate so that we can comment on it.
OK, great Pablo, I think what we are going to do now is to start
with some questions that I have here, and I think you
have pointed out the first one that I am going to ask you,
and that is to tell me what are the main
drawbacks or obstacles that Spanish
institutions encounter when they are going to
implement the OTM-R system in
selection processes? What are these disadvantages
or these obstacles that might prevent the process from running smoothly?
Cecilia and Xavier, your microphone is disconnected
who starts I think that
in general, and this is included in the OTM-R guide,
this has to fit, as Pablo said, with
national legislation, that is to say, the point is that this
OTM-R is a guide lines with some recommendations.
it is a kind of guideline but then it has the k10 that we
put in the document when we wrote it in 2014,
2015 that obviously we know that there are restrictions
on how an institution deals with issues and how
it deals with recruitment. and of course, this is different from
career progression, which an institution also has to be clear
about. So, for me the biggest obstacle is that,
that is to say, there is national autonomous institutional legislation
that makes it more difficult and what they do say from Europe
is to apply it where possible, if it cannot be for the whole faculty,
for the faculty of this area or R1 faculty only, that is to say,
this flexibility is allowed, in no case is it everything, it can
be dosed so in broad terms but I believe that Xavier
and Pablo have much more to contribute in reality.
I agree with Cecilia, I think that one of
the limits or one of the corsets that all institutions
face, and I would say that it goes beyond the OTM-R in our case, is a regulatory
framework that is very rigid, perhaps because I come from the legal world,
but it is true that in our autonomous and national
context, universities face regulations that, rather than
opening doors, in many cases, establish limits that are
difficult to operate. I also believe, as I said,
almost to defend the legal profession, that there is another
issue that has to do with the academic culture itself
and that transcends the issue of law, that is, universities
are faced with a proposal that is very attractive, that is very seductive,
but that, at least in the case of Pompeu,
many of my colleagues find it a strategy for a
rich country. they say that ours is not like this, we are
not yet in the situation they are in at Dutch,
British or Swedish universities, we are in a much
more precarious situation and therefore trying to jump so far
can cause more damage than anything else. and I would almost say
that in our house the first thing that had to be broken was that cultural
corset, those deep-rooted practices in which those who have been
at the university for a long time automatically deserve a
permanent position and this, in some way, is opposed to attracting
talent from outside and they tend to be opposed as
if they were a zero-sum game, as if one thing were necessarily
against the other. This has obviously not been helped by the replacement
rate in recent years which, as it has set
many limitations, it is true that in some cases
it has made it very difficult to reconcile one thing and another.
but I agree with Cecilia with the legislative framework and I
would add, just to enrich the debate a little, this other issue,
which is the lack of culture in this area, let's say,
I am not talking about human resources or staff training
because I imagine that Xavier can also put his
spoon in this, I will leave the difficult part to you Xavier.
I am adding up because I am adding up, the legislative part or the regulatory
framework that makes it difficult for us, the cultural part
we know how complex it is to manage people, on the
economic issue I obviously prefer not to go into, so
in the end I come back to Salustiano's
first intervention, I liked it a lot because for
me it is an absolutely fundamental part
we cannot discuss about, I don't know,
the things we have been
talking about today, the single European market,
without having a perfect picture of the professional career
of researchers, articulating all the processes and linking
all the processes together. and for me this is one of
the main barriers we have at the moment,
or one of the difficulties we are facing at least at the
institutional level
well, you can hear me, right, because suddenly
Xavier's image is gone but you're there because I heard you,
everything is fine, right? yes, yes I am here, I don't see anybody, but I'm here.
I think the image has gone for everyone, yes it is a bit strange but as long as
we listen to each other, well, the next question or approach
I would like to ask you is a bit, well apart from increasing
employment opportunities for research teaching staff
in this OTM-R strategy, it is also important the role
of young PhDs which of course is a boost
to be able to enter any European university so I would like
to ask you, what aspects are the most valued in
this recruitment, we can go to the same order of response as
before Cecilia Pablo and Xavier yes, I think that what is most valued
is that, it is to have all the information, that is,
I think that the fact that the whole process
is made public, the questions are explained exactly,
the young people who are entering the world of research,
to see all this, it is true that it gives the feeling that
endogamy does not exist, so I think that transparency is the
greatest benefit, I would say the part of transparency It is true
that there are other advantages, obviously, because you get the best
person for the job, but I think that the transparency part,
that is, explaining what it entails, is a positive thing,
and I think that young people see it as a positive thing.
Yes, I fully agree, I think that transparency is certainly
something that is valued very positively and I would add
to transparency the predictability. In the context
of Catalan universities, and I think Xavier will agree
with this, in recent years we have suffered some ups and downs
and this has generated uncertainty among young doctors and not
so young people who suddenly were doing a series of things
thinking that this would lead to a certain place and
halfway through, the conditions have been changed
or new conditions have been introduced and this leaves many of them in a state of disarray
because they say, well, in the middle of the career, suddenly, you
add obstacles that I had not foreseen
and some of them are difficult to overcome, especially
when we are talking about young women who
may have decided to have children, which makes the situation
much more complicated. Therefore, I believe that transparency is a
very important factor, the predictability or clarity of
the criteria is also very important and I honestly believe that
the simplicity of the procedures is also something that is
highly valued, that is to say, to have the feeling that
the objective is not the procedure itself, that is to say, now
I say this as a professor of law, that in the end the
objective is not so much the regulation and the process itself, which
sometimes seems to take on too much importance,
but the fact that it is about choosing a person with talent.
you don't have to force someone to do three cartwheels,
four somersaults and seventeen burpees to know
if they are more or less in minimum physical shape and sometimes
the feeling has been that in order to qualify for a particular
vacancy you practically had to go through an obstacle course
that took a lot of time. so, I would add this if you also
want to speed up the procedures and in our case I would
add what could be a good practice, we have
tried to shorten the recruitment processes as much as possible,
we have tried to open and close them within the legislation in
processes that do not take more than three months. and this is something that
they also appreciate very much because normally a candidate can
apply or can apply in several places and this is good for
the university and also for them.
Yes, yes, I agree with Cecilia and Pablo's comments,
it is also true that the fact that there has been an
increasing dissemination of the possibilities of
vacancies for doctoral or postdoc studies
also facilitates this mobility
and that young researchers are increasingly
aware of the need to apply
regardless of where they are looking for the quality
of their research. and this is being facilitated both
by this concept of open, open processes
and transparent processes, in other words, I believe that the fact that
OTM-R policies are being applied at a European level
is a great source of good prospects for
young researchers, but also of
attracting talent from outside Europe because they see in Europe
a very interesting opportunity for work and possibilities
for joining research groups. In other words, I think that all of these
OTM-R policies are a good stimulus
for young researchers.
well
there's a question but I think we'll leave it to the end
because I've seen in chat yes, yes, no problem because
now I suppose you might ask some more questions and I'll pick it up and then I'll incorporate it, don't worry.
Well, let's go with the last one, one of the last
questions which is, from this at the end also, x
questions which is, from this at the end also, I suppose that each institution is different
as Pablo pointed out and in each layer there is
a whole gear, the question would be what recommendations or
pi patterns that you think that you are function would
guidelines, that you think have worked for you, would you give in this case to the Carlos III University in
the recruitment policies those aspects where you do think they are effective
that is where you can really put all your eggs in the basket.
I'm going to let Pablo and Xavier respond to that because I think it's much more specific to the institution. I simply congratulate
the Carlos III University for this initiative for the logo and I recommend that you follow
the path already started and share these experiences.
this is a general recommendation but I think that for the specific question
Pablo and Xavier can answer it better. thanks Eva,
I always run away from recommending to someone what
to do because almost every morning and every night
I reconcile with myself, but if I had to point out
practices that have worked for us at Pompeu
and I would also like to thank Carmen
two things that have worked very well for us, even if they appear
minor and very ridiculous, is precisely the welcome
and onboarding programme for researchers. It is true, and I think
it is fair to remind you, of course, to think that every year we
have to incorporate ten, fifteen researchers
the year we are more generous or have more opportunities,
so this allows us a more personalised service.
but from, for example, offering an initial payment for
setting up and renting to facilitating the process of
enrol children in primary or secondary school or help them
for example, in the processing of official documents.
This is something that researchers have appreciated and always
point to as one of the most welcome elements of the strategy.
and another thing that I have found very useful since I have been vice-rector for teaching staff
for the last two years and a bit, always, when
we recruit new staff, after recruiting them, we
can afford it because there are few of us, as
vice-rector I give them a welcome interview to the
and I always tell them, you don't have to tell me now what research
you are going to do and other things, tell me what you thought was the
worst thing about the recruitment process and what you would change,
and based on the experience of the people who have gone through the process and who, despite everything, or thanks
to the process, have decided to come to Pompeu, we have been learning
good practices that have helped us to improve.So, I don't dare
say that this is something you have to do at the Carlos III,
but I would say, or almost say I would make a firm commitment
to active listening, that is, those who go through the process
learn from what they found best and what they found
worst. and also, and this is something very useful, those who started
the process and who drop out, also ask them what
made them abandon the process, if it is because they have found
another offer or because the process itself was badly thought out, and I give
an example so that it doesn't seem that only the university was celebrated
for example, at the beginning we had a department
that asked for a sort of motivation letter, an explanation
that was about fifty pages long, and you can imagine that some
European researchers when they looked at those said,
don't wait for me. So, in that average
there were places where we received five hundred people and in others
we received two and I always wondered how there were two
people willing to go through that ordeal. and logically
people told us that of course if you ask for all this no one will come,
in the end with the evidence we were able to convince the department
to remove that requirement but I would say something that
is useful is to always listen to those who enter the procedure
both those who drop out and those who pass and give us super
useful information on what to do and what not to do
Xavier? I, my advice will be, what I don't advise doing which is,
we try to apply so hard OTM-R
that I think we overdo it so, any kind
of temporary contract we tried to make the process as open,
transparent, merit-based as possible so that, sometimes a contract
for a project that was a six-month contract, we were three or four
months into the selection process which was a real
whopper. So, my advice is that we adapt the
OTM-R to the different types of contracting that we
want to do, with different timescales, with different
criteria, I understand that nothing is wrong, the important thing
is to be clear about the objective but not to try to be so strict
because otherwise we ourselves fall into a trap from
which it is difficult to escape, that the
selection process is longer than the duration of the contract
itself, so that is my advice. yes, Cecilia also pointed it out,
this flexibility that seems to allow us to go a little bit outside
of what we are used to. Well, thank you very much
Cecilia Xavier and Pablo for your interventions, x
I think that we have come a little closer to this OTM-R
strategy which, sometimes, for those of us who are not so involved
in human resources, it is no less familiar,
but I think that, indeed, we have taken away
a general idea and also with examples, which
was also the objective of this discussion panel.
thank you very much and I think that Lorena will now take over
for all the questions.
you can hear me like that, can't you? yesperfect Eva, thank you very much
and a very interesting panel without a doubt Pablo Xavier
and Cecilia, I have loved all our interventions.
now it was time for the debate with the attendees for some
strange reason today they are not very active but we are still keeping
the space for you to ask questions,
however I would like to, Tano, do you want to connect your camera
so you can go on stage again and maybe we can have a little
debate among those of you who are here? I could think of, well,
a lot of questions to go deeper into this subject and
as for the macro and micro, I'm sure
that from CRUE you have more information about
how this update of the law
of science is progressing. I know what the new statute
for researchers is doing and to what extent or what measures you think
or know that it is increasing in terms of professional
careers, in other words, some new developments that
have not yet been voted on and approved, but what is being discussed
in these areas. well, as the vice-rector commented, it is clear
that there is an agreement to move towards this idea
adapted to our legal framework of Teniortrack but we have
a few complications in harmonising the languages and
from CRUE we are trying to harmonise the languages of two
different ministries because the problem we have when we modify
the law of science is in one ministry and that of universities is in the other
and sometimes the reality of the OPIS is legally
different from that of the universities in terms of recruiting
human resources. and that is where, now that there is a
political will to define this professional career, this career
with certainty, let's say, with a Teniortrack at
all stages of the research career, we have the added difficulty
of working in different departments, although
we are trying to coordinate. We
are trying in CRUE to ensure
that what is in the science law is somehow in line
with what is being discussed in the law on universities
because it affects the faculty in particular.
well, in this sense, I think that the fundamental advance
is going to be the definition of this, well, pseudo teniortrack because
in the drafts we have not yet reached the teniortrack,
we insist, although what we are going to have to achieve is not so much,
what is important is not so much that the figures in the
different stages until consolidation are well defined,
but what is important is that the universities have autonomy
and that they do not create straitjackets so that there is no
funneling situation. The replacement rate
has already been mentioned here many times because the paper supports everything and you can write
the positions in the law very well but then it is unfeasible to put it into practice
due to issues as apparently unrelated as the economic mandate
to reduce public employees. then,
if we are all considered public employees,
not even the labour route would be useful for us
with this criteria.I don't want to reduce civil servants, I want to reduce public
employees, so it is tremendous and as we are in a country,
unfortunately, maybe I am politically incorrect, but
if there is coffee we can give it to everyone and if there is no coffee we don't give it
to anyone. it is tremendous, it is not the same to cut back on one type
of activity as on another type of activity
and here it is very difficult for us to distinguish between the strategic importance
of certain sectors in public employment and other sectors
in public employment. but in order not to complicate our lives we are a
rather cowardly country and if we have to cut or control
public employment in a certain percentage, we make
an equal distribution in all scales and typologies, it doesn't
matter if you are a surgeon or a controller of the
administration or administrative support or whatever, it doesn't
matter. So, we are not moving in a clever way,
obviously in our country to solve it we have to commit to
the matter and we have to make a
strategic commitment to resources and do like Germany,
if we are in crisis what we have to do is to triple
the resources for R&D, not to cut resources for R&D.
is that when the economic crisis, before the health
crisis, the economic crisis that reached
its peak in 2013, while we were making savage cuts
in public spending on R&D in universities and so on,
in Germany it doubled because for them
it was strategic and here this is not happening to us,
I think there is a funnel. I don't think things can be done if,
even if we make very good rules and very good laws, which
are going in the right direction, we don't provide
resources and remove regulatory corsets
that don't make any sense. perfect and an answer if you can
be more concise so that we can also give space to Xavier
Pablo and Cecilia to what extent we are thinking about a professional
career, a bit diversified, not only to end up in
the academy but also for positions
more related to technology transfer or with
the support of technical positions,
we do not have to wait for all the pre-doctoral candidates, many of whom
are here today listening to what their future will be,
not everyone has to wait to be a university professor.
to what extent this statute for researchers
is considering alternative outlets for research. and there
we have a pending issue
the academic career, that we are studying how someone who enters
the system through teaching needs and
someone who joins the staff through
researcher positions and how they come together within the regulatory
framework and we are forgetting about the other aspect. we make
this call for attention in our document the university 20/30
we put it at the top of the table in the chapter on transfer,
in the chapter on R+D but so far it has not been addressed
and I suppose it is difficult for them because in the general state administration
when you talk about all these figures they assimilate it to
the law on civil service scales and with the complication
of creating a figure in the law on civil service scales
they are scared to death. So, I think that
we should tell them that it is not necessary to propose a law on scales
but rather to create a set of figures that have an end in the
labour market that would be easier
within the universities' labour staff, and later on,
how this would be made operational, what transition would there be from
this finally consolidated labour staff to permanent staff
to the equivalent civil servant posts in the technical area?
and technical in these aspects of research support
in the sense of being real researchers who accompany
the PIs, of being technicians who accompany the group, even
of being innovation managers who accompany the group because the
groups are becoming more and more multidisciplinary and we need expert
people, we need basic technicians but
we also need very expert people who know how to work wonders
with specific equipment or a specific singular infrastructure.
and we increasingly need more and more expert staff in research and
innovation management and in generating instruments,
in designing equipment and above all almost in internationalisation,
commercialisation, making the most of research
results well, there is a whole series of
angles that whenever we talk about this, the general state
administration assimilates it to the law on scales and then they
go crazy. no, let's open up some figures, I did it on a small scale
in Galicia and it worked very well, what happened is that the next government didn't
continue with it. of course, you create training contracts
with these differentiated categories of FP, graduates,
doctors, others who join if they do their homework in
training if they meet the objectives set for them and then
after the four-year incorporation, if they meet the objectives
set, they undergo an accreditation process
like the Ramón y Cajal but in the escalation let's say of
technicians, each one with their own indicators at their own levels
and then they would go on to work personnel. and this is
what we are talking about, we still haven't been able to, we have to fix
the it and as the other stuff depends on different areas and they are
giving in on little things that are perhaps popular but which can
distort what the career is. He talks about this a lot with the
rector, the rector of the Carlos III is very clear about it,
in other words, what worries him most are those, let's say,
exceptions that are being made that could destroy
the concept. and we are insisting, and I say this because
Juan Romo is the one who most insists that if you
want to fix the problem of collective X Z or Y,
make a transitional provision but do not spoil the picture because
otherwise it is no longer teniortrack. well, we are looking at this
and forgetting about the other thing that is missing, which is the whole contingent
of human resources for the research needed by
the PIs. thanks Tano and continuing with this thread I think
that evaluation is key in the development of the professional career
and Pablo you mentioned that you have a programme that is
still incipient, you said that you would implement it in
November but I think that you are well ahead of schedule.
so can you comment on something else or, I don't know, maybe share the
criteria or some aspects of these evaluation mechanisms
for R2 fundamentally? no problem Lorena and I'll start,
as Xavier said before, I'm going to start by acknowledging
what was perhaps a small errorfive years ago
we decided to establish an internal evaluation system
beyond the accreditations that ANECA
or in the case of Catalonia ACUP, we decided that the Pompeu
Fabra University would have an internal evaluation system
that would allow us to classify the process as excellent or very good
, good or in need of improvement.
that first evaluation system made
two mistakes or committed two mistakes, one that it was too centralised
in the sense that it did not properly accommodate the particularities
of the different departments and the differences that may
exist between a researcher in law and one in biology
and another in technology and this generated some distortions and a
second error is that it focused, and here there is
almost an atavistic, almost foundational defect of the university,
on research issues. and neglected its teaching,
management and knowledge transfer dimensions, which
are also very important in a university. What happens is
that we talk a lot about how important they are, but
when it comes down to it, when it comes to measuring and promoting,
this costs us a lot more and the bulk is determined by the
research trajectory. and of that experience, which
you can imagine did not generate a lot of friends,
even enthusiasm among the university, even though at that time,
I must say, the result was only beneficial, that is,
whoever was evaluated well obtained a series of benefits,
whoever was evaluated well stayed as he was, that is,
so there was no penalty, but even so, you can
imagine that there were people who said, but how is it possible for
me to do badly and not be rewarded? so, it forced us to
reflect on what we are doing now in November. So, this
evaluation system is now based on four
pillars one that has to do with research and here we are
making a commitment to an evaluation that is, once again, a bit qualitative,
there is almost a pendular question, we are trying to escape from
indexes, indexed journals and quartiles, we will not go into
this debate now because otherwise we could be here this morning
and Salustiano could say much more about this as he knows it,
but we are trying that, by peers, with all the necessary independence,
they can make a... that read the articles is that we have
reached a somewhat draconian system in which people are evaluated
without reading what they write, we look at them by means of indicators that
they give us and that's all. so, there is a part of the research
that is committed to the qualitative question, a part that
has to do with teaching and that again, this is costing us a lot,
is trying to emphasise an evaluation that does
not only depend on what students say, because
student evaluation is very important but is
mediated by many other issues that do not necessarily have to
do with the quality of teaching and here we are articulating
a peer evaluation mechanism and above all
involvement in teaching innovation projects. The third
part is transfer, and here we have to be grateful
that the famous six-year transfer period was launched because
it has allowed us to develop some indicators and this is
a very clear commitment of the university, in fact our strategic
plan already includes it, our main task for the
coming years is not so much to be good at research
as at transfer and to give back to society what
we do. And a fourth part that is always, sorry, the ugly
brother or sister of the teaching staff's dedication,
which is management, and at Pompeu I am not ashamed
to admit that this is a subject, one of our
Achilles' heels. What happens to us is that we are committed to good
researchers but logically people who are very good at research
do not always want to devote themselves to management but of course universities
have to be managed by someone and what happens to us is that
we find ourselves increasingly in departments where no one wants
to be, I am not saying programme coordinator, but in some
cases, nobody wants to be dean, nobody wants to be department director,
nobody wants to be vice-rector in our university, when people say to me,
well there will be fights to be vice-rector, I say, well I don't know,
we are almost going to end up with a system where everyone picks up
sticks and the one who gets the shortest stick will have to
keep the vice-rectorate. and this also has to be
rewarded, it has to be trained and it has to be rewarded. So, the evaluation
we are designing is based on these four pillars, it tries
to establish shared criteria that I think we documented in the previous
session and at the same time it leaves approximately
30% discretion to each department
on average, so that each department can adjust it
to its own particularities, we will see how it works,
I think it improves some of the issues that had
not worked well in the previous evaluation but
we will surely find that it has other problems that we will
improve but it is also the result of a collective process that has
taken us two and a half years and it has not been easy.
congratulations, we are going to finish because
we are already going very late but I want to be
fair and a very brief intervention of Cecilia and
Xavier Cecilia in telematic mode and as in the
radio commercials. what things are you doing
in FECYT to accompany all the transformative processes
in professional careers? OK, well, very quickly,
we have a mentoring programme, what FECYT wants is clearly
that a research career within the university
academic environment is fine, but what we want to
do is to help people find other opportunities. So, we have a programme
called REBERCA Researchers Beyond Academy, which is basically
part of these predoctoral and in some cases postdoctoral students
who want to look for opportunities in industry, the private sector and the administration.
we help to match those people with people in those
institutions so that they can see the real life of what
life outside the academy is like, that is one of our programmes
for being very brief because we are going to be very short, thank you Lorena. Xavier last contribution,
it occurred to me to ask you about internationalisation issues
but, well, tell us something about what we can learn from
your university. very briefly, I think that one of the services
that has worked best to help the incorporation
of international researchers has been a service that
was created called international support services, which is personalised
support for researchers when they join the university,
personalised in the sense of processing visas, work
permits, opening bank accounts, all these administrative
processes that are, for an international researcher,
a real barrier and a headache. Therefore, personalised accompaniment
is provided and even, in the case of those who come with a family,
we look for schools or the dual carreer to help the couple look for
work in the area surrounding the university. I think that these types
of services have been a step forward and are very
interesting for researchers. without a doubt, so if you think it's ok
having spent eight minutes we are going to close this
seminar, the last words will be given to the Vice Rector Ignacio Aedo
but I would like to remind those of you who are still connected
that at the end we will send you a brief survey, I would ask you to
answer it briefly because it helps us to improve in each seminar
and then we will inform you about the last one that we will organise
probably a month ago. thank you all very much
to Tano Cecilia Pablo Xavier Eva Antonio and to all
the almost one hundred people who were connected. well, I think
we have learnt a little bit from all of you, thank you very much
and go ahead Ignacio Well, little more than to
thank all the participants, both the interviewers
and the interviewees because it has been a very interesting
session, many of the things you have mentioned we are trying to
implement them at the local level of our university
but even so, we still discover that we still have
much more to improve and therefore I think that we will take
into account many considerations that you have made.
thank you, thank you also to the participants,
today we have reached one hundred and six if I have not seen it wrong
at some point of participants now we are at eighty-two. but I
think that this seminar initiative allows us to make
known a European initiative that was born a long time ago and that
in the university we are a bit late and that
we have to keep pushing and motivating to move forward
everything that has to do with the human resources strategy
for the faculty. thank you very much to all of you and
we hope to see you at the next one, thank you.