Professional development

People are the primary resource of a business and a good business team, with the right skills and experience, is essential. 

This workshop covers how to go about building a business team; what skills to look for; how to approach and negotiate with team members; what to offer them; and how to keep them on board.   It will cover:

• Team skills for success

• Practical aspects for how to build and develop a business team

• Setting up a winning team

In addition, the interactive workshop allows you the opportunity to begin assessing your own team style and skills.

This course relates to domains B2, B3, D1, D2 and D3 of the RDF.

What's my business (or my project) worth?

Are you interested in becoming an entrepreneur? Are you trying to raise money for a company? Or are you working with large capital projects? 

This workshop explains how to understand the bit on Dragon's Den when they say 'I'm offering 37.5% of my company for £500,000'. Where do those numbers come from and how are they calculated?

We will illustrate a number of simple valuation methods including book value, market capitalisation, and discounted cash flow and show you how to calculate them using Microsoft Excel. You will become familiar with terms such as net present value, internal rate of return, risk-free rate and risk premium. As a side effect you will also understand more about our current banking and financial crisis!

As well as potential entrepreneurs, this workshop would be of interest to anyone working in areas where large capital projects are planned, costed and valued - architecture, civil and chemical engineering, aerospace, and renewable energy to name just a few.

This course relates to domains B2, B3, C3, and D1 of the RDF.

When establishing a business the financial reporting requirements, and the issue of getting finance, can seem daunting.  This workshop aims to explain clearly what is required.

A clear and concise session which provides delegates with an easy but comprehensive understanding of:

• the reasons for starting one's own business

• methods of communication

• accounts - profit and loss, cash flow and balance sheets

• management reporting

• raising finance

• sources of finance, including a valuable insight into business angel investment in Scotland

• preparing a robust business plan

• structuring your financial package

• meeting your ongoing obligations and responsibilities 

The session draws on delegates own personal experiences to bring the topics to life.

This course relates to domains B2, B3, C3 and D2 of the RDF.

This second careers session will focus on implementing career decisions. You will have the opportunity to consider how organisations recruit new staff and how you can locate suitable career opportunities including ways of tapping into the ‘hidden job market’. This session will also explore the selection process and the range of assessment tools used by employers and will help you prepare to market yourself effectively at all stages.

Prerequisite

It is strongly recommended, but not essential, that you have attended “Reviewing Your Career” in advance of this session.

This course relates to domains B1, B2 and B3 of the RDF.

This course is part of a programme offered by the Careers Service. The first session will introduce a model of career management and will focus on aspects relating to career decision making. You will be provided with an opportunity to reflect on your career to date and to consider your personal skills, values, interests and preferred work styles. Through the process of reflection you should be able to start to identify your own priorities for future career development before exploring different methods of generating and researching career ideas.

This course relates to domains B1, B2 and B3 of the RDF.

The core business of a PhD or early career researcher is to have new ideas and then explore them. Originality is our shared currency regardless of academic discipline. And yet many researchers report finding themselves stuck in a rut, having the same thoughts again and again, when what they really need are fresh insights, new concepts and original ideas.

This empowering and challenging course will allow participants to bring along their own real problems and explore them from a number of new angles.

The course will focus on the needs and personal creativity styles of all the participants and will then will move on to explore;

• How to explore a problem and tackle it from a number of new angles
• A range of creativity techniques and how to apply and implement them
• A toolkit for evaluating ideas

This course relates to domains A2 and A3 of the RDF.

Do you feel equipped for the challenges ahead?

Whatever your career objective, be it continuing in research, moving into a commercial role, entering the public or charity sectors or building and managing your own company you need a broader set of skills and attitudes than those developed through your research.

A new programme, developed in partnership between the University of Edinburgh and two successful female business owners will help you to be successful in the challenging environment we are working in.

This free course, aimed at female researchers, takes place over three days from October to December 2012.  

Day 1
Dates: 8^th October 2012
Location: Room 1.11, Main Library, Central Area
Theme One: Creativity
Creativity is not a mysterious gift possessed by some and envied by others. It is a set of behaviours which can be easily learnt and applied in everyday life. Learn how to boost your own creativity, understand more about the creative strengths you have and develop a strategy to improve your innovative approach whatever work you do and whatever career lies ahead. Leave the workshop with your own tailored creativity toolkit you can use in the following two workshops.

Day 2:
Dates: 9^th November 2012
Location: G37, Patersons Land
Theme Two: Cash
What is your attitude to money and finance? Something scary… or exciting? The initial focus of this workshop will be to explore and understand your own behaviour with money and then to develop the most effective approaches. You will learn how to value and cost your ideas, be they for a business, research project or your own time. You’ll see how money can be managed and explore your own feelings about risk. This is a highly interactive day with practical outcomes.

Day 3:
Dates: 7^th December 2012
Location: Lorimer Room, Old College
Theme Three: Control
Managing a career is challenging. We may not always feel that we can control our environment, the people around us or even ourselves. This workshop will help you to articulate your career vision and work out how to achieve it. We will look at how to work effectively with others to help you secure your vision. Techniques will relate to negotiation, relationship building, self awareness and priority setting.

THIS IS A THREE-PART COURSE - THE SECOND AND THIRD PARTS ARE BEING HELD ON 9^TH NOVEMBER AND 7^TH DECEMBER 2012 AND ARE IN DIFFERENT LOCATIONS.   PLEASE NOTE THAT YOU SHOULD ATTEND ON ALL DATES.

*Please note* after completing this form you will receive an automated email confirming your booking, but please note that because of the limited number of places available we cannot guarantee you a place until your application has been reviewed.  Please explain what your enterprise idea or objective is - this will help us allocate places if the course is over-subscribed.

This course is aimed at doctoral researchers and early career researchers who have responsibility for supporting the learning of others though demonstrating, tutorials, seminars and supervision. 

We all learn in different ways, but we don't always appreciate the impact of these differences on our ability to retain and use information. This course will explain some of the theories that describe learning approaches and give you a set of practical tools to use in your own work.

Facilitation is the art of bringing about learning from the perspective of the learner, so the whole workshop will be based around improving your understanding about learning, by seeing how different teaching and development approaches favour different kids of learners.

We'll also look at the practicalities of helping people learn - what steps you need to take and how to handle potential tricky elements such as feedback and handling questions.

If you want to improve your approach to teaching and supporting the development of others, this course will help you to develop effective and engaging methods.

This course relates to domains D1, D2, and D3 of the RDF.

Want to get your postgraduate research off to a flying start?

This session has been designed for first year postgraduate research students who missed out on introductory training and induction events at the start of the academic year.

This interactive, informal and practical session will provide you with an opportunity to:

• get to know other postgraduate research students
• look at the process of doing research in academia
• discuss PhD targets, goal setting and consider the challenges you will face
• consider both practical day-to-day advice and larger issues of good research practice

This course relates to domains A1, A2, C1, and C2 of the RDF.

This course is aimed at 2nd and 3rd year Phd students and Early Career Researchers

Together, ERI and IAD deliver this course to help early career researchers locate and successfully apply for suitable sources of research funding after completion of the PhD.

Course content will include information on:

•  Key funders and available funding schemes
• Where to seek help and advice in the University
• Successful researcher experience at different stages of the academic career path. 

Multiple sessions of this event are held during the course of the academic year, targeting at a College level. 

This course relates to domain C3 of the RDF.

Intellectual property can be a very important business asset when first establishing a company. 

This workshop will allow you to become more familiar with the basics of IP and where you stand in generating an IP, specifically covering:

• The main types of intellectual property

• How are they used and how to protect and exploit them

• Copyright basics

• Patenting and computer programs

• IP in practice; creative uses of IP in the digital age.

This interactive workshop will use case study scenarios to illustrate how IP affects businesses working together and the type situations that will arise with regard to intellectual property rights and software used.

This course relates to domains B3 and C1 of the RDF.

This new two-part course, delivered in one day, is a highly interactive exploration of how important and personal our daily management and goal setting can be to help us achieve our life and career goals.

We’ll explore themes in Time Management such as:

• Chronological preferences and their importance
• Time management tips that work and those that don’t
• How seasons and work routine/or not have impact on us
• How to take control of our well-being and performance
• Why work doesn’t always happen at work

 We won’t be looking at diaries...

 In Purpose and Goal Setting we’ll look at:

• Writing your individual purpose statements
• Working on your work/life strategies
• Models for goal setting that work for you
• Traditional models that don’t...and why
• Devising workable and daily action plans based on Japanese Kaizen principles of incremental change

The course tutor, Iain Davidson, works with many students and staff in universities throughout Scotland and Ireland to help them improve their personal effectiveness and their working preferences for the challenges of rapidly changing world.

Managing your time, your goals and yourself is a new course which will hopefully challenge the way you think about traditional time management and goal setting models.

"Assertiveness is not what you do, it's who you are."  Shakti Gawain

The aim of this brief course is to enable delegates to have a greater self confidence in difficult situations and feel able to express their opinion by:

• Understanding differences between assertive, passive and aggressive behaviours
• Feel confident to ask for what they want and express their opinion
• Expressing their opinion clearly and with confidence

Those who are truly assertive believe not only in the validity of their own views and requests but also of the views and requests of others. Therefore this half-day session will focus on an exploration what an assertive attitude is and how it will influence behaviour. This will be achieved through a blend of case study and situation-based discussion to share knowledge and skills, tutor input, paired work and practise of assertive behaviours.

This course relates to domains B1 and D1 of the RDF.

This workshop will provide a practical introduction to social enterprise and beyond the introduction will cover three important elements to consider when setting one up:

1. Why should a social enterprise be started and what is its purpose?

2. Who will buy and what are they buying?

3. Who will fund the start up of a social enterprise and why would they?

The session's practical elements will include looking at a range of existing case studies of social enterprise, examining the motivations and requirements of social entrepreneurs and hearing from Edinburgh University postgrads who have started their own social enterprise.

Turn Your Good Idea into a Great Opportunity and get a taste of what it takes to bring your business idea to life!

This half-day workshop, brought to you by LAUNCH.ed and the Institute for Academic Development, will cover:

1. Evaluating the commercial potential of your idea
2. Identifying competitors and differentiating yourself
3. Identifying and prioritising your potential customers, and
4. Articulating a compelling business proposition.

This practical, interactive workshop is a perfect taster session for anyone with a business idea or looking to commercialise some aspect of their research.