The Researchers' Newsletter – Aug 2025
What is research coaching?
RCA provides coaching and workshops for researchers. We often get asked ‘What is research coaching?”
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What is research coaching?
RCA provides coaching and workshops for researchers. We often get asked ‘What is research coaching?”
First, let’s start with what research coaching is NOT. It is NOT training. Most researchers have had a great deal of training. Typically, training is to support the average or typical researcher. It is NOT mentoring, where listening to another’s experiences is the main form of the engagement.
It is helpful to think of the two terms: Coaching and Research.
Why Coaching?
Many different types of 1-to-1 interactions can be called coaching.
Bachkirova, T, Cox, E, and Clutterbuck, D say (in The Complete Handbook of Coaching 2nd Ed, SAGE, 2014), there are many different forms of coaching, as a human development process involving structured, focused and personalised interaction and a range of techniques and tools to promote desirable change for the benefit of the coachee and other stakeholders.
RCA likes to use a simple working definition of coaching that is about our process:
“…coaching helps researchers to work out their own solutions to their research and research career issues by: providing information, asking questions, facilitating thinking and actions (including written documents), providing feedback on that thinking and action. Researchers then take away outputs from the coaching that they have developed themselves and that they own…”.
Why Research?
Traditionally in universities and other research organisations more junior staff would learn from the more senior research leaders including their supervisors. Such mentoring has been an effective tool in past decades – but things, including workloads and workload models, have changed.
Our experience tells us, that an independent and confidential assessment of a researcher’s career, strengths and areas for development, as well as individualised advice and guidance are things that many researchers may no longer receive, given the work intensification facing all staff.
Research coaching is a way of compensating for the conspicuous loss of effective research mentoring within institutions.
Research coaching then, is about the individual researcher and about strengthening research outcomes and the individual’s research career. As noted earlier, the logistics of coaching can be organised at many levels. But coaching is about the individual not the average.
Advice: What most researchers need to sort out to advance their careers are the many competing priorities, the work and non-work demands and their own motivations, barriers, opportunities and ways of working.
What is needed: RCA uses researcher driven coaching methods that place the responsibility on researchers for accountability to their coach over the 6 – 9 months during which each coaching program operates. This provides a more accountable development intervention than traditional workshops and training courses.
What are the outcomes: The proof of the pudding is in the excellent results that individual researchers obtain from the “at elbow” support provided by coaches. This is also the satisfying thing for coaches - RCA’s contribution to the next generation of researchers, as a continuation of our life’s work.”