Skills You Need to Become a Researcher
By: Team Ifairer | Posted: 10-01-2019
Heart It
A research degree is ideal if you are looking to pursue your studies at a higher and more detailed level. It can lead to a career in industry, government or academia, and you can become an expert and leader in your field. Here are some generic research skills that will help you achieve your goals.
Project Management
Project management essentially means good planning. You will have to define your research in terms of achievable aims, the time and resources needed to do this. You will have to provide a step by step plan of how you intend to carry this out. This stage of your research must be completed in order to get external funding, so without this skill your research project will not even get off the ground. If you are currently working on someone else's project as an assistant, try to learn as much as possible from them about the details of planning and running a project.
Dare to fail
Research is about finding new insights. You cannot do that without taking risks. You need to dare to fail. Most senior researchers would be able to write a book about failing. Document your failures. What did you try, and why, and what went wrong? Next time, you will avoid that path.
Handling Data
Depending on your field the sorts of results you get from your project will vary widely. It could be results from experiments within a laboratory, statistical evidence gathered from work in the field or qualitative material gleaned from interviews or from research in an archive or library. Whatever sort of results you get, you need to be able to handle large amounts of data efficiently and effectively.