Skills You Need to Become a Researcher
By: Team Ifairer | Posted: 10-01-2019
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IT skills
Closely linked with point 4 is the necessity of developing IT skills. It is unlikely you will be running your own research project without being fairly IT literate, but there are always new methods or packages to learn about, so don't stop! For example, are there any data collection or storage packages that would help your research that you are unfamiliar with? What about analytical tools for working with large amounts of data? Perhaps you need something bespoke and experimental for your project that you could help to design.
Spend more time on the questions than on the answers
This is a common mistake among junior researchers: To quickly pick a problem, and then spend all too much time finding answers to that very problem, not seeing how full the world is of other more pertinent problems.
Team leading/managing
Being good at working with others is a difficult skill to achieve especially in the academic world when we are used to working with a large degree of autonomy. However a research project often requires the assistance of others: colleagues at your institution and elsewhere, administrative staff and possibly people in the private sector as well.