Researcher Education and Development Scholarship Conference

Sandy Sparks, Spark Your Development (previously MI TALENT/ UKITSS), UK and Trevor Hardy, Senior Laboratory Technician, University of Birmingham, UK

This article shares information and learning from a nationwide Cross-institution Mentoring Scheme for Technicians and technical staff (CIMS-T). One of the recommendations of The Talent Commission Report (2022), called for the “development and training of technical professionals, career development, and building future technical capability.” To address this need, in 2024, a cross-institution mentoring scheme (CIMS) pilot was developed by MI TALENT and funded by Research England, and subsequently became the CIMS-T Scheme delivered by the UK Institute of Technical Skills & Strategy (UK ITTS) from 2025. The technical community drawn from Higher Education Institutions (HEI) and Research Centres and Institutes work together to continue to improve development opportunities for technicians.  

Design rationale 

Where mentoring is designed with intentional aims and a clear understanding of the leadership context, it encourages both parties’ engagement in meaningful dialogue, and mutual empathy, trust, and cross-cultural awareness (Guccione and Hutchinson, 2021). CIMS-T was a mentoring scheme created by technicians for technicians. Technicians tend to be highly specialised in their field, so it is rare for an institution to have more than one technician with the same speciality. Additionally, technicians often work alone in Departments or Institutes, so an institutional mentoring scheme often does not meet their needs. This makes finding a mentor with the required level of skills and knowledge nigh on impossible. By widening the search, we can locate an abundance of highly skilled, highly experienced technical staff in Higher Education or Research Centres nationally. Uniquely, CIMS-T aimed to utilise this abundance to help provide high-quality and relevant mentoring opportunities for technicians around the UK, and at the same time adding valuable leadership skills for technicians who mentor. The independent report ‘The Role of Technicians in Knowledge Exchange’ report (2024) also highlighted mentoring being part of informal knowledge transfer, technical capability building, and sustaining specialist expertise across institutions and industry partnerships.  

What we did?  

CIMS-T was developed from a group-work exercise in the MI TALENT Collaborative Leadership for Technicians Programme, where technicians were asked to think of an idea, that met a need, that they could collaborate on. A group of technicians from different institutions came up with the idea of a technician-focused mentoring scheme and an implementation team comprising both authors and four technicians, led the pilot in 2024. 

Pilot year  

We had a total of 79 technicians wanting to be either a mentor or mentee. Applications were received from 38 different institutions (HEI’s or Research Centres). Participants completed a pre-survey to help us with matching mentors and mentees, and the post-survey, which provided valuable feedback.  

In the pilot year, we also provided online workshops, and an in-person event for continuous professional development – ‘Winterfest’ – a free national workshop session for sharing information, and supporting learning and planning for next steps as well as ensuring increased access to development activity. With the level of demand for mentoring clear to us. We also provided: 

• Online workshops ‘What is Mentoring’ and ‘Managing your Mentoring Relationships’ and created a recording to sustain access to resources for the future. 

• An in-person event for both mentors and mentees, which included a CPD session covering the GROW coaching model, communication behaviours, and effective listening skills. 

Outcomes and feedback 

The response to CIMS was far greater than any of us expected. It demonstrated that technicians have been missing out on appropriate, valuable and value-added mentoring for too long. In 2024, we made twenty-three successful pairings with a range of mentoring approaches including one-to-one, one-to-two or group mentoring. In total, 31 technicians received mentoring in some way. 

Benefits of the scheme  

We identified a number of benefits for the different stakeholders (mentees, mentors and institutions) as well as economic and societal benefits, as evidenced by programme feedback. We found that: 

• Participants liked being matched with other technicians, setting CIMS scheme apart from other institutional mentoring offerings 

• Mentees reported having gained skills and insights, having increased confidence, making new contacts at other institutions, and the setting and achievement of career goals. 

• Mentors also reported having gained confidence. They reported feeling positive about ‘giving back’ and perceived that they had improved their questioning and listening skills. 

• Tangible outcomes included several applications for regrading, promotions, and new technical jobs/roles, as well as business plans that had been submitted. 

• Economic and societal and institutional benefits were shared. A participant stated “my mentor helped me develop a business plan to request further resources”. 

In line with our findings, the ‘Research Culture: A Technicians Lens’ report (2022) also references the type of mentoring where technicians support and mentor one another, as key. The reports discusses technicians contributions to supervision, teaching, mentoring, and training of students and researchers, and it notes that mentoring plays a part in supporting such career development and as an important mechanism for professional growth, confidence building, leadership development, and knowledge transfer within technical communities. It further suggests cross-institutional networks enable peer support, and communities of practice which function informally as mentoring structures. Importantly it connects mentoring to a positive research culture with positive impact on retention, belonging, visibility of technicians, and supporting under-represented groups in technical careers. Our findings and experiences with CIMS corrobrate this report. 

Our reflections on the pilot 

There is a huge appetite across the HE and Research communities for technician mentors, and it was gratifying to find that as anticipated, the CIMS-T scheme was able to fill this void for those who signed up. Points of enhancement for the next cycle, included more detailed matching forms as matching suitable pairs of mentees and mentors requires the collection of information specific enough to identify exact needs, wants, and the skills changes participants required. Futher, future matching will align with career pathways (Technical Specialist, Technical Manager, Teaching Support Staff) where possible. We also decided to limit the number of mentees, with no more than three per to mentor to maintain quality assurance and not overload mentors. An unanticipated benefit was the emergence of a meaningful nationwide technicians’ mentoring network, led by The UK Institute for Technical Skills & Strategy, and if you want further information on joining CIMS-T contact UK ITTS  

A call to action 

Recommendation 5 of the ‘Strategic Technical Leadership: Advocacy, Empowerment and Transformation’ report (2024), notes that “Strategic Technical Leaders should be given professional development opportunities, including mentoring and coaching from senior leadership.” CIMS-T is a blueprint for enacting this recommendation. The broader argument of this report though is that technical leaders require structured development opportunities and institutional support to operate effectively at a strategic level. Through this mentoring model, we present an example of a creative leadership approach (working cooperatively by creating the conditions and environment to develop innovative ideas) that meets that call to action. CIMS-T has contributed to shaping a culture of development for technicians who contribute to research. The inclusion, recognition and development of all staff who support, perform and enable research, is a much-needed way of enhancing the UK’s research culture.