A paper from the 2013 STEM Annual Conference.
The gaining of complementary skills is one of the aims of the European Higher Education Area as it promotes training to ensure that all graduates have the skills necessary to enter the global job market. Whilst PhD training in the UK has seen the inclusion of transferable generic skills in addition to subject-specific such training is not common in all European universities. There often exists a lack of understanding amongst academics supervising PhD studies as to the importance of such skills to the future employability of their students.
The Marie Curie Initial Training Network DITANET (Diagnostic Techniques in Particle Accelerators) aimed to improve the employability of researchers by providing both subject- specific and generic training from a variety of academic and industry trainers. In this contribution the training concept is presented and student feedback summarised as a means of understanding the benefits or otherwise derived from such trainings.
