Soft skills

Basic research and soft skills of the PhD students will be developed, first of all, through the daily research work; collecting their own experiences is most important. This process will be supported by regular measures of the RTG. Special emphasis will be given to develop leadership abilities of the PhD students.

A series of soft skills workshops of (typically) one day will be organised in collaboration with BYRD, the graduate center of the University of Bremen. Furthermore, the RTG is part of the Minds, Media, Machines Integrated Graduate School (MMMIGS), which supports doctoral candidates and supervisors in established structured doctoral programs, serves as a hub for already established structured programs and offers a demand-tailored scientific qualification program. The qualification program complements the transferable skills workshops offered by BYRD as well as the thematic courses offered by the doctoral programs themselves.

Over three years, every PhD student must attend (at least) six workshops.

Mandatory workshop topics are:

• Principles of good scientific practice
• Intercultural competences, dealing with gender and diversity

More topics for soft skills training workshops may be chosen from:

• Upward leadership
• Collection, storage, editing and sustainable provision of research data
• How to build and lead a working group
• Research funding and proposal writing
• Techniques and skills for scientific presentations
• Initiation and implementation of research projects with industry
• Good teaching: “The scholarship of teaching and learning”