5.4 Helping hand
Remember, there is plenty of support available to you in your quest to return to STEM work! There are a number of agencies and funding resources specifically created for returners from career breaks, as well as other organisations, advisors and formal networks to help you find jobs, start up a company or choose a suitable training course. You can find more details of these in the Further reading section.
If you have previously been a researcher and are hoping to return to a research career, either in industry or academia, there is a special scheme available that offers a two-year funded fellowship, run by the Daphne Jackson Trust. In this video, Katie Perry from the Daphne Jackson Trust describes the scheme.
Download this video clip.Video player: return_to_stem_week1vid5_512x256.mp4
Transcript
KATIE PERRY
The Daphne Jackson Trust is an organisation that's solely dedicated to returners to STEM. And we offer fellowships. The fellowships have a dual purpose. They offer a researcher the opportunity to undertake a challenging research project alongside an individually tailored retraining programme that will take them from a position of not being competitive at the start of their fellowship – obviously after a career break – and it will make them competitive at the end of the fellowship.
We offer fellowships to researchers in STEM who have been on career breaks for family caring and health reasons for a prolonged period. We have to accept people onto our fellowships who've had a career break of two years or longer. Typically though, it can be five years, eight years, ten years or more. And they must have a first degree in a STEM discipline, at least three years research experience post first degree, and be a resident in the UK in order to be eligible.
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