Research training program

The Postgraduate Forum

VU offers a comprehensive research training program for research students and supervisors.

It features workshops and seminars with a strong focus on the formation of 'Communities of Practice'. This is about bringing students and experienced researchers together to learn from sharing their expertise and experiences.

VU's Research Training Program features over 100 seminars and workshops every year, with a strong focus on building key research capabilities such as written and oral communication in research, research design and statistics, qualitative and quantitative analysis, and library and information literacy for research.

The Postgraduate Research Training Calendar 2012 is now available. Changes and updates will be sent to students and supervisors via email.

Choosing a training session

To assist graduate researchers and their supervisors in selecting training appropriate to their needs, the range of training workshops has been broadly structured into a matrix along two dimensions:

research stage
research graduate capability

Research Development Stage 1: Foundations of graduate research

Workshops offered in this stage are especially designed to assist students who are in the first 6-9 months of their candidature. They introduce foundational skills and support students’ development in a number of areas of research capability that are important in laying a strong foundation for the ongoing research project.

Research Development Stage 2: Practising as a graduate researcher

These workshops are geared to meet graduate researcher needs from when researchers have achieved or are close to achieving candidature through to the end of their data collection and analysis. The emphasis in all workshops is on the sharing of practice in different areas of research. This includes consideration of the nexus between theory and practice across a range of research methods and techniques, and sharing of experiences and strategies with other researchers (graduates, postdoctoral and experienced researchers) who are working with the same or similar data collection and analysis techniques.

Research Development Stage 3: Achieving Outcomes as a graduate researcher

Graduate researchers are increasingly being expected to achieve a range of outcomes from their research. In addition to having the major goal of producing a research thesis with the associated skills in planning and structuring of chapters, and writing up and presentation of the research in ways that fit with disciplinary conventions and examiners’ expectations, researchers need to plan for other outcomes alongside the thesis, both while they are studying and following thesis submission. Workshops offered as part of the ‘Achieving Outcomes’ program are most relevant for postgraduate researchers from the end of their first year onwards.

Registering for a training session

Registration is through the research training booking system. The Research Training Program Guide provides further information about how the program was developed, how sessions are released for registration, how to register and where to find updates.