Exposure to other working environments and sectors has a number of potential benefits. Even for those who wish to stay in academia, cross sector interactions can promote knowledge exchange, network building, and awareness of different ways of working. However, these opportunities are not always available to everyone, and there are many potential factors which may limit the feasibility of these schemes.
We define career mobility schemes as those which enable knowledge exchange and exposure to new ways of working across different disciplines and sectors. These might include:
Secondments and micro-secondments
Workplace shadowing
Pivot fellowships
Aims:
To understand the appetite for different models of career mobility schemes
To understand the barriers and enablers of different models of career mobility schemes from the perspectives of:
Researchers
Industry partners
Higher Education professionals/scheme enablers
In this work package, we will to use focus groups and surveys to engage with stakeholders across industry, academic institutions, as well as researchers themselves, to understand the appetite for these schemes, and which models would be most feasible.
On 11th May 2026, we held our first focus group with biomedical biomedical research staff at the University of Oxford representing computational, bench-based and technical career paths to understand their thinking. This report will be available in the coming months, and will be used to form the basis of a short survey which will be distributed to researchers nationally.
Get Involved:
We are currently looking for volunteers from industry or higher education roles to take part in our upcoming focus groups. If you are interested in enabling career mobility opportunities in biomedical data science, please get in touch at: integrate@imm.ox.ac.uk