If the field of academic research has always been your dream, the chances are that you’ve worked exceedingly hard to get to where you are. You’ve studied hard, taken on unpaid internships, and worked in roles that weren’t quite the right fit but gave you the foot in the door that you needed to get to where you are now – aka when you’ve landed a job that you are actually excited about. 

Now that you’ve found a role that calls to you, you might be starting to wonder just how prepared you need to be to not only fulfil your duties but to excel within the role. The good news is that for most research-based roles, you need a selection of the same skills to propel your career forward and make yourself really stand out. 

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Wondering what these skills are? Below is a guide to some of the tools that you can utilise to help yourself excel in a research role. 

Improve your project management skills

The truth is that every research project requires a level of project management, and so, it pays to have some knowledge of project management. Project management simply means a high level of project planning – it’s all about how you intend to reach that final goal. 

Good project management practices involve setting achievable aims, realistic goal posts, and determining any resources that will be required to get the job done. As a researcher, these project management skills are vital, as they will allow you to streamline your processes and will make working on each project – and achieving your goals – easier and more doable. 

Be smart about your approach 

The key to success in research is working smarter, not harder. A big part of being able to do this is being smart in your approach to managing your workload. The key here is simple: find ways to make each task quicker and easier to complete, without cutting corners of course. 

Smart software is the answer to this: there are lots of pieces of smart software that are ideal for researchers to utilise to make each aspect of different projects easier to manage. One of these pieces of software is literature review software, which has been designed to make reading literature and getting as much out of it as possible, far simpler, quicker and easier. 

Learn to handle budgets

The chances are that you did some level of budget handling as part of your studies, but if you’re going to excel in your role it’s important to level this experience up and improve your knowledge around budgets and how to use them in a research role. 

There are plenty of online tutorials that can help with this side of things, so it’s worth taking the time to undertake some additional training to increase and improve your knowledge around budgeting for projects. 

There you have it, a guide to some simple ways that you can make excelling in a research led role a little easier to achieve.