The Vitae Researcher Development Framework 2025

Vitae, an organisation which “exists to champion careers in research, across all sectors”, first developed a development framework for researchers 15 years ago, in 2010. Vitae interviewed a wide range of stakeholders, including researchers themselves, managers of research and researchers, funders, end users, and policy makers, to establish the knowledge, values, skills and behaviours of effective researchers. These were then brought together, articulated in a discipline-agnostic way, and published as the RDF 2010.

The RDF 2010 has been extensively used across the research sector, nationally in the UK and internationally, and usefully so, but has been showing its age for a little while. Enter the Vitae RDF 2025. This has been updated and substantially re-imagined to more accurately reflect the current research landscape.

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There are a number of ways in which you can use the Vitae RDF 2025 to support your research career. Firstly, you can use it to benchmark your existing knowledge and skills. Secondly, you can use it to plan your development. And thirdly, you can use it to help you articulate your skills without reference to the specifics of your discipline – a useful skill for job applications and in interdisciplinary collaborations.

You may find it helpful to be familiar with some of the terminology associated with the RDF:

• Domain:  one of the three top-level sections of the RDF – Researcher, Research, and Research Communities.
• Sub-domain:  one of the five numbered sub-sections of the domains. The Researcher domain and sub-domain 1 are equivalent; the Research domain consists of three sub-domains, 2, 3 and 4; and the Research Communities domain and sub-domain 5 are equivalent.
• Descriptor:  one of the 31 knowledge, skills and behaviours of effective researchers. These descriptors are grouped according to themes and allocated to a domain/sub-domain.
• Descriptor summary:  a brief statement giving an overview of the knowledge, skills and behaviours encompassed by the descriptor.
• Phase:  each descriptor contains up to four phases, representing distinct stages of development or levels of progression within that descriptor. For a full understanding of a descriptor, review the detailed information in the phases for that descriptor.

However you use it, there are a couple of things to always bear in mind when using the Vitae RDF 2025, which can be summarised as: don’t try to tackle the whole thing in one go! A well-rounded researcher will be developing only selected skills across all of the domains and sub-domains of the RDF; at any given time, there will be a few of the descriptors which will be more immediately relevant to you than the others. And for a postgraduate researcher, you would normally be hoping to benchmark and develop your skills within Phase 1; this is a research career lifetime document, so save Phase 4 for the Professors.