The call is inscribed in the Open Science Agenda, which incorporates activities that makes it crucial for Higher Education Institutions to integrate new or existing skills courses into PhD programmes and to train data stewards. Especially the formal integration of skills courses developed with and by non-academic actors and provided in non-academic surroundings into curricula, will be a specific challenge.

A broad package of skills-related training, integration and intelligence for researchers and scientists in all career stages will need to be developed. Preferably pilots will be organised by (or in cooperation with) experienced projects which already received EU funding or are currently funded under Erasmus+, Horizon2020, ITN, MSCA. In all cases, partners should be able to demonstrate proof of concept and initial impact of the PhD training and reasoning for improving and formally integrating skills training. Initial postgraduate tracking exercises have to be integrated in the proposal, to demonstrate ability to trace postgraduates during employment (including sex-disaggregated data). Counselling initiatives of PhD candidates and PhD graduates into focused careers in and outside academia should be provided.

Impact is expected on post-graduate candidates and early stage researchers, careers, in closing the skills gap between research employment in academia and beyond academia. Expected impact also on the improvement of the innovation potential of future PhD candidates, by joint design of skills training courses and curricula of consortium partners into modernised PhD programmes. Expected impact on the joint collaboration between academia and stakeholders in the regions (hubs) by improving skills intelligence, skills visibility and comparability for better career choices; learning about future skills needs and employment potential of scientists of all (interdisciplinary) fields. 

Opening: 11 December 2018
Deadline: 02 April 2019 (17:00 CET)
Budget: 2 000 000
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