• Question: What do you think would help boost your understanding of your jobs?

    Asked by 844cara47 on 26 Jan 2018.
    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 26 Jan 2018:

      I tend to encounter two main categories here:
      1. More technical knowledge about how specific things work.
      2. More organisational knowledge about how the industry as a whole operates and is organised.

      Technical knowledge for me is scientific literature and commercial reports about how robots in homes are used, what the current capabilities of artificial intelligence are, and so on.

      Organisational knowledge includes current supply and demand for the researchers with specific skills, specific topics the government or private funders are investing in, career progression through the academia, and work opportunities in industry.

      Both are pretty much endless and ever-updating topics. There is always more to know both in technical and organisational sides of things. Knowing at least something in both really boosts the understanding of how things work, and where to best apply yourself in my opinion.

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 26 Jan 2018:

      I wish I was better at programming in R (programming language). R wasn’t around when I was in graduate school (1988-1992) so I learned other computer programming languages. Now virtually all of the grad students and young post-doctoral researchers program using R. I’d then be better able to help them when they get stuck with problems in computer code.

    • Photo: Sarah Finnegan

      Sarah Finnegan answered on 1 Feb 2018:

      I think taking lots of time to read scientific papers would help me with my job. I often get inspiration from other pieces of work, thinking about how to build on whats been done so far, or I learn new ways of analysing data.

    • Photo: Rebecca Dewey

      Rebecca Dewey answered on 5 Feb 2018:

      Time! I never have enough time to read thoroughly around something before I start using it, or really deeply learning everything in neighbouring areas to the one I’m working on. However, that’s why we work in multidisciplinary teams – we share responsibility and knowledge on different areas and work together towards a common goal.

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