AVA Complementary Skills School

8th - 12th January 2018, University of Liverpool, UK

Why do you need complementary skills? A good set of complementary skills will help you gain the greatest impact from any technical or scientific knowledge you may have. Complementary skills will help you manage your research project and present your results to different audiences, and in longer term also make you more attractive to employers in the competitive jobs arena. These skills are transferable and so make you more robust and flexible. They could help you take advantage of cross-sector opportunities between industry and academia or to work better at an interdisciplinary level. This is the reason why EU-funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions incorporate mandatory complementary skills training in their projects. This training is implemented in AVA through an established quality programme of complementary skills training developed and tested during the delivery of three other European networks coordinated from the University of Liverpool. This programme has been recognised as best practice by several institutions including European Commission. 

The training will be organized around the following topics:

  • Project management
  • Presentation skills
  • Scientific writing
  • Peer review
  • Team work
  • Time management.

The skills school will be followed by a media skills workshop at Manchester Media City from 15th – 19th January during which all Fellows will contribute to the creation of an AVA promotional film.

During the first week, AVA fellows will be joined by fellows from LIVDAT, a big-data research network based in Liverpool.