The Research Professional Futures project
The Research Professional Futures project was announced in October 2025, with £4.5m of funding from the Research England Development fund. Its focus is the “visibility, recognition, training, and career pathways” of those in research professional roles, with planned outputs including a blueprint for the sector.
It is co-led by Durham University, King’s College London, the University of Warwick and the University of Stirling, alongside delivery partners including ARMA, the University of Oxford, Research Consulting, the PRISM network, and the National Centre for Research Culture at the University of Warwick.
At the International Research Culture Conference this week, some of the team involved in the project shared some initial insights from a survey which ran over the summer as well as from ongoing interviews with research professionals.
The panel began by noting that of 690 survey respondents, more than 80 per cent said they identified with the term “research professional” to either a great or moderate extent. One of the panellists, King’s College London’s Isabelle von Holstein, said she was “quite surprised” with the term’s take-up, given its relative novelty.
The University of Oxford’s Jess Pilgrim-Brown said that the interviews being conducted for the project showed that there was a degree of diversity to how respondents saw their professional identity, and that what came across most strongly was affinity to particular forms of expertise, such as research impact or research management.
Another theme said to be emerging from the research was challenges with professional development – in particular due to institutional cutbacks – with some interviewees speaking of reaching a ceiling in their role and “having nowhere to go.” There were also said to have been examples of research professionals citing “very negative attitudes” from academics towards their work – Durham University’s Lorna Wilson, who was chairing the panel, suggested that many in these roles would have examples of negative sentiment and dismissiveness.
Research Consulting’s Dan King gave the audience an overview of some of the early findings around artificial intelligence use, estimating that around three-quarters of those surveyed had said they used AI tools at best occasionally. He said that this suggested a “disconnect” from where the community needed to be, adding that it “feels certainly like something that the sector needs to move on a little bit more.”
The panellists shared various aims of the project – these include the creation of a professional development framework that speaks to the breadth of research professional roles in the UK, an online recruitment platform, and further refinement of the research professional typology which the project has developed. A call for pilot projects will be opened in “about a year”.