A rhetoric on competences has developed for the past decade, calling for young researchers to be “highly skilled professionals”; it is not new – but louder and louder. Numerous reports have been produced by many European and North American associations and also within the Bologna process

http://europa.eu.int/comm/education/policies/educ/bologna/bologna_en.html) ,

and the list of skills which are called “core”, “key”, “soft” or “transferable” is impressive :

• Critical analysis
• Ability to conceptualize and to see the “big picture”. Is forward-looking. Understands the implications of his/her work in broader institute and industry perspectives
• Capacity to organize own and others’ work well
• Knowledge development/Sharing
• Strong commitment to quality
• Capacity to identify key issues and to disaggregate them into sub-issues that can be tackled separately
• Searching for creative ideas, thinkiing “out of the box”.
• Ability to stand up for people and his/her ideas/beliefs
• Capacity to understand and respect other individuals and cultures

Listening actively and responding constructively to others’ ideas, and considering others’ perspectives and inputs

Although we defend the idea that training through research can provide the young trainee with the skills required not only to conduct research but to apply for a job in industry, reality often points to a different situation: the structure of power and the relentless competition inside the lab and between disciplines is a major obstacle to the development of core skills like creativity, problem-solving, critical thinking and communication; it is time researchers consider the problem and include training young researchers into their duties – I mean of course training young researchers to be professionals - that is devote time, reflect on the pedagogical issues, the methods to be used etc. The future of research is at stake.

Indeed, the implications of the rhetoric on competences are very serious: we must indeed be conscious that when speaking of young researchers as young professionals, we refer to the same category, but from a different viewpoint: if our aim is indeed to train highly skilled professionals, and again, if we don’t want it to be just another terminological hype, we have to address the following questions considering the present situation:

1. How can we ensure that skills/competences are acknowledged by students and supervisors, and that they are assessed by and within the scientific community using proper assessmentschemes and criteria?
2. How can we bring evidence that the training itself, is assessed in terms of quality, with rigorous criteria, tools and procedures – and not only on the basis of publications and peer committees as is common within the scientific community?
3. How can we certify that the achievements of people who have been trained are of high quality, that they are not limited to academic achievements (i.e. number of papers published and thesis presentation) and also include achievements outside academia?

Researchers devote a lot of their time to writing ( Latour, B., La vie de laboratoire, 1988). The pressure to publish (« Publish or perish ! ») is such that PhD students and their supervisors tend to produce at least one or two papers and yet, they easily acknowledge the fact that they don’t spend enough time on the activity of writing. Practices vary according to laboratories, but many times PhD students will provide their supervisors with accounts and data from experiments, the supervisors putting the paper together in order to gain time or just because “the student doesn’t master the English language well enough”.

Such practices are negative for two main reasons: first, they may lead to misconduct – fraud, problems of intellectual property, etc - ; second they do not favour the development of skills and competences in the young apprentice.

We defend the idea that training through research can provide the young researcher with the skills and competences required by many employers only if he/she can provide evidence that he /she has received excellent training.

PhD students have many opportunities of developing strong communication skills: going to conferences (writing abstracts for papers or posters, full papers, preparing oral presentations), publishing their research in journals, producing reports for various stakeholders and PhD committee members. But communication skills are not only technical – mastering a language, its grammar and style. They are mostly of a cognitive nature: it is therefore crucial that supervisors spend time and develop a pedagogical approach to ensure that their students master their subjects, that the research strategy and methodology are of high quality and that the research is presented clearly and precisely.