Call to Action: How can Universities Support Doctoral and Early Career Researchers During COVID-19 (and Beyond!)

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the UK in March 2020, universities closed their doors with uncertainty over when they would reopen. In the early stages of lockdown, many doctoral and early career researchers (collectively, ECRs) felt their institutions had forgotten them. Vitae and the UKRI-funded Student Mental Health Research Network (SMaRteN) surveyed 5,900 ECRs across 128 UK universities at the end of April 2020, to establish the impact of lockdown on their work. While almost two thirds of respondents agreed that their supervisor/line manager had done all they could to support them, only 38% felt the same way about their institution. A quarter of respondents identified that their relationship with their university had worsened since the pandemic began. Right now, a key question is: what can universities do to support their ECRs? Our survey asked respondents for suggestions of how their supervisors/line manager and institutions could help them to work effectively during lockdown. We have worked with a small team of ECRs to complete thematic analysis on a representative subset of over 1,000 suggestions. We have taken an inductive approach to analysis and have worked at a semantic level with the aim to create a rich description of the dataset. All suggestions were double coded, and the research team worked together to develop themes from codes identified. In summarising our results here, we present a simple set of recommendations for steps institutions and supervisors/line manager to ensure they are providing comprehensive support for ECRs.