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In most institutions all staff, including research staff will be entitled (or even required) to participate in regular appraisal or a professional development review. Appraisals and reviews are a good way of exploring researchers’ training and development needs.

However these schemes may vary in the extent to which they encourage researchers to reflect on their career-related training and development needs as well as their project-related training and development needs. In some cases, according to local arrangements, the research team leader may find that they are not the designated appraiser or reviewer for members of their research team.

The Research Team Leader is often in an ideal position to provide training and development opportunities for research staff, certainly within the project. So, even if the Research Team Leader is not the appraiser or reviewer, it makes good sense for him/her to discuss with the researcher the training and development needs that have been identified.

It would be good practice in any case to instigate regular ‘review’ meetings with researchers to discuss their career- and project-related training and development needs as some of these could inevitably be developed within the context of the project.

The following Resources contain helpful material to help research team leaders and researchers determine what professional development they need.

• Resource 'Preparation for Review Meetings: Planning your Agenda' outlines a possible format for the ‘review’ meeting at the three different stages of the project – induction, core research time and the end of the project (or contract).
• Resource 'CPD Matrix – Personal and Professional Skills' provides a simple approach to training needs analysis which can be used to help the researcher (possibly jointly with the Research Team Leader) to assess their competence/confidence in relation to their allocated project tasks and responsibilities.
• Resources 'CPD Matrix – Personal and Professional Skills'  and 'CPD Matrix – General Research Skills' detail several levels of competence of each of a range of personal, professional and research-related skills. They can be used very effectively by researchers to ‘pinpoint’ their current skills level and to identify what they need to do to reach the next skills level. 
• Resource 'Skills Analysis summary' provides a useful pro forma for recording a personal skills analysis and translating this into a personal development plan.
• Resource 'Personal and Professional Development Plan' provides a format to help researchers to review their research-related and personal/professional skills in a more comprehensive manner and to record this in a professional development plan.