Prosper PI Network: postdoc career conversations – a coaching approach

Join us and award-winning leadership coach Denise Chilton to take the guesswork out of successful career conversations with your postdocs.

Registration website

About this event

Holding career conversations with your postdocs can feel challenging and some PIs feel pressure to know all of the answers. However, you aren’t a career consultant (nor are you expected to be) so how can you have meaningful career conversations?

Come along to hear from Denise Chiton, a professional certified coach and leadership development specialist with over 10 years’ coaching experience, about how to hold a career conversation with practical advice, a live demonstration and a resource to take away.

This topic is delivered across two sessions. Don’t worry if you can only attend one; they will be recorded and made available on the Prosper Portal afterwards. You don’t have to have attended session 1 to be able to attend session 2 and vice versa.

Session 1 – A Coaching Approach to Career Conversations,

Wednesday 30/06/21 10.00 – 11.00 am

Benefits of attending

• Find out what exactly is coaching? ‘The Principles’

• Deepen your knowledge of coaching relationships and how their principles can be applied to help you talk to your postdoc, roles and responsibilities and how to set and manage expectations.
• Learn the core skills of; asking powerful questions, listening and use of silence, giving feedback and reflecting back

Session 2 – TGROW: a template for holding a Career Conversation

Thursday 08/07/21, 14.30 – 15.30

Benefits of attending

• Find out how to prepare for a career development conversation with your postdoc
• Learn how to structure the session – using TGROW, a tried-and-tested four step model to help the conversation flow
• See a live demonstration of a coaching conversation
• Receive a practical resource to takeaway that you can apply to your own conversations with your postdocs

This session is only available to University of Liverpool, University of Manchester and Lancaster University staff. When registering for this event please ensure you use your institutional staff email address.

Format of the session

This session will be held on Zoom, delivered by a professional coach Denise Chilton. The session will comprise a talk from Denise with time for questions from the audience.

More about Prosper and the PI network

Prosper is a new approach to career development that unlocks postdocs’ potential to thrive in multiple career pathways.

Based at the University of Liverpool in partnership the University of Manchester and Lancaster University, our ultimate goal is to open up the huge talent pool that exists within the postdoctoral research community, to the benefit of postdocs themselves, Principal Investigators, employers and the wider UK economy.

We’re establishing a PI network that will put you at the centre of championing postdocs and driving change in how we approach their career development.

The network gives you the opportunity to:

• Influence, pilot and shape the development of Prosper and its resources to support both you and your postdocs in their career development.

• Share knowledge and learn from colleagues across the full range of disciplines at the University of Liverpool, the University of Manchester and Lancaster University.

• Share experiences and build relationships with employer partners, opening up new networks and opportunities for collaboration.

• Raise the profile and recognition accorded to successful postdoc development at institutional level.

Who can attend?

We encourage PIs at all levels to participate, and we welcome anyone who line-manages a postdoc or hopes to employ a postdoc in the future to come along.

Find out more by visiting our webpages, emailing us at [email protected] or follow us on Twitter.