Looking forward to 2025 (Episode 59) | Sarah shares a sneak peek into what is coming for Research Adjacent in 2025
For the last episode of 2024, host Sarah McLusky is looking ahead to 2025 and sharing a sneak peek into what lies ahead for Research Adjacent.
Sarah talks about
- A preview of upcoming episodes and a special mini-series
- The new research-adjacent careers quiz and making the podcast back catalogue more accessible
- Her half-written book on research adjacent careers
- New workshops and support for research-adjacent professionals
- Launching the Research Adjacent Community for self-employed folks
Find out more
- Suggest a guest via this form
- Try out the research-adjacent careers quiz
- Sign up to the Research Adjacent newsletter
- Follow Research Adjacent on LinkedIn Instagram and now BlueSky
- See the list of workshops and training Sarah offers
- Come and join the Research Adjacent Community for freelancers
- Email a comment, question or suggestion
- Leave Sarah a voice message
Theme music by Lemon Music Studios from Pixabay
Episode Transcript
Sarah McLusky 00:00
I’ve also got some new resources and support for you and your research adjacent career, and that’s for everybody, whether you are considering a research adjacent role, whether you’re already employed, or whether you are self employed.
Sarah McLusky 00:17
Now that I’ve said it, all is a lot, and it is going to keep me busy in 2025
Sarah McLusky 00:25
Hello there. I’m Sarah McLusky, and this is Research Adjacent. Each episode, I talk to amazing research adjacent professionals about what they do and why it makes a difference. Keep listening to find out why we think the research-adjacent space is where the real magic happens.
Sarah McLusky 00:46
Hello and Happy New Year. Welcome to the Research Adjacent podcast. I am your host, Sarah McLusky, and this is coming out on the very, very last day of 2024. Rest assured that it has been pre recorded. So if you are listening to this when it comes out, I am preparing to celebrate Hogmanay like the good Scot I am. I am not sitting at my computer and worrying about doing podcast episodes. So I hope that you are the same, and I imagine that by the time most of you are listening to this, it will already be 2025 so welcome to the new year. 2025 I have to say, sounds like a slightly crazy day. It sounds like something from back in the future, Back to the Future, although, when I went and checked Back to the Future, the future was actually 2015 which makes me feel really, really old. But um yeah, they thought we were going to have flying cars and everything by now, but we don’t, sadly. But here we are in 2025
Sarah McLusky 01:49
So this episode is going to be a companion to the last episode. So the one that came up, out just before Christmas was a review of 2024. For this episode I am going to be looking forward to 2025 and I’ll tell you about a few things that I have got coming. So this is going to include, I’ve got a preview of some new episodes that I have got in the pipeline, including a special series. So I’ll tell you a little bit about that as we go through. I have been working in the background on some better ways to explore the back catalogue that we’ve got now of nearly 60 episodes. So I’ll tell you a bit more about how you can access that and what else is to come. And I’ve also got some new resources and support for you and your research adjacent career and some new ways that you can work with me, and that’s for everybody, whether you are considering a research adjacent role, whether you’re already employed or whether you are self employed. So keep listening, and I’ll tell you a bit about those as we go through.
Sarah McLusky 02:57
But first of all, I wanted to give you a little bit of backstory as to how I’ve got to the point that we are at now. So the Research Adjacent podcast has been going for two years now, and when I started the podcast, I was only really thinking about profile raising. I was getting, I’ve written about this and talked about before, but very frustrated at the fact that research adjacent roles were often very much in the background, not appreciated. And so in my mind, the podcast started as more of a research culture thing because of that frustration that we were being left out of the research culture conversation. But then, as often these things do when I started to speak to people, everything started to change and expand. The things that people started telling me about started to be slightly different things to what I expected. Of course, all of my guests share their challenges and wishes with me, which are really interesting insights. After all, I do ask what they would do with a magic wand, so that was really interesting to start with. But also other people got in touch, and lots of people getting in touch and saying that they felt really seen telling me about other challenges that they experience. And also a lot of people saying that they were recommending it to people that they knew, like PhD students and postdocs who were considering a change of career, and that’s a group of people that I always wanted to help write from the start and because I used to work a lot with people in those kind of situations who weren’t sure about following an academic path, but had no idea about what else might be out there. So all kinds of people, professionals, freelancers, students, started gravitating towards me and sharing their stories, sharing the podcast episodes, and connecting with this idea of being research adjacent. Now, I’ve always been an educator. I actually was a lecturer for many years, and problem solving is also one of my superpowers. So I couldn’t help but start to wonder what else I could be doing to help these people who were coming into my world. So a large part of what I have been doing this autumn has been laying the groundwork for offering some more tangible and tailored support for all you current and aspiring research adjacent folks out there.
Sarah McLusky 05:30
So that’s a bit about the background and why I’m doing what I’m doing. So let’s get on now to what I’m actually going to be doing in 2025 so first up the podcast and a little bit about what you can expect to land in your ears in 2025. Now the first thing I said that I’m really excited to bring you is a special series. Now, have been describing it as I talk about it with people as a skills series, but it’s not what you think when we talk about skills, I’m not going to be talking about teamwork or communication skills or anything like that, at least not directly. Instead, what I’m going to focus on are some of the trickier things that come up again and again with the research adjacent folks I talk to, whether that’s guests on the podcast, it’s people that I talk to in workshops, people who send me messages and things like that. And those are things like influencing people that you have no formal authority over. Then there are the imposter experiences that come with working with highly specialist researchers, navigating the inevitable change that comes with life in any organization, I think, really, but especially in the higher education world at the moment. Loneliness with people maybe being the only person in their team or department who does the kind of work that they do, and the need to patchwork together your own professional development pathway, because there really isn’t much out there, which was an eternal frustration for me when I worked in a university, and all the training and development was aimed at the researchers. So I need to think of a better name for it now. I can see it’s not really skills. Maybe I’ll call it the challenges series. But anyway, the thing that I’m doing now is that I am focusing on getting those episodes recorded. I’m aiming for five episodes. I have got most of the guests lined up. I just need to deal nail down the recording dates and get them all in the bank and but hopefully that series will come out in Spring, maybe towards the end of February, March, April, that kind of time is when I am hoping it will come out. So that’s really exciting, and I feel like for me, it’s something that I’m hoping will be really useful.
Sarah McLusky 07:47
Other things I’ve got the pipeline are, one thing that I’ve been thinking about doing for a while, and I’m going to just do it, is to turn the tables and be a guest on the podcast myself and tell you my own story. I haven’t done this up until now, because when I started, the podcast, I thought that the only people would listen would be people who already knew me. But now I think there are a lot of you out there who don’t really know my history and how I’ve ended up here and doing what I’m doing, it is a bit of a convoluted tale. I often say that I had a portfolio career before it was fashionable, but I think it might help you to understand where I’m coming from. It might be interesting, and it might help you understand why helping research adjacent people is something that I feel so strongly about, so that, again, will probably be sometime in the spring, I’ll have a look at schedule.
Sarah McLusky 08:40
And of course, there are going to be more just regular episodes featuring the squiggly career stories of various research adjacent professionals doing a big range of different roles and working for different organizations. I’ve got some recorded and ready to go. I still have plenty of gaps to fill, and I always welcome guest suggestions. Thanks to everybody who has already sent in suggestions. I am working my way through them, but I do need to, if you, if you put yourself forward, or somebody you know and you haven’t heard from me yet, it’s probably just because I need to look at the balance of the podcast and things like that. So, yeah, working my way through the list. But if you have another suggestion that you would like to send in. There is a form on the contact page of the website, and I will also put a link in the show notes as well. So please do feel free to send me get more guest suggestions. I would especially love to hear from people who do roles that we haven’t previously featured on the podcast, some gaps that I know are definitely there are people who work in the policy world, although I might have somebody a line on somebody for that, and people who do things like finance or research funding, because I feel like those are gaps that I’ve currently got, but honestly, I am open to just about anybody, anybody who has really great insights into their field, anybody who’s got an unusual job, I love to hear about them, and anybody who just has got an interesting life story, whatever. So yeah, please send me your guest suggestions.
Sarah McLusky 10:17
Speaking of the website, that’s another thing that I have been working on behind the scenes. Over the last couple of months, I have been moving the podcast from where I originally hosted it, which was on my own freelance website, which is called sarahmclusky.com to a standalone website which is called researchadjacent.com so it’s just research adjacent all one word.com I’m doing, that means that I can start to make, as I say, better use of that existing archive of episodes that we’ve got so many people now, amazing insights, a huge range of different job roles, people with different backgrounds, so lots of really useful stuff there. But I do get that at the moment, it’s a bit hard to navigate. So one of the first things that I have done is I have created a quiz. Now this quiz is aimed at people who are not currently research adjacent and are looking for some inspiration. But to be honest, anybody can do the quiz. So if you fancy it, just go and have a look. One of the testers said, it reminded them of a Smash Hits personality quiz, which is pretty much the exact vibe that I was going for. And so you answer questions about what you’re good at and what you enjoy doing, and it will suggest one of four job categories and send you some podcast episode suggestions to help you get into it, or maybe find some that you haven’t listened to so far. If you want to try out the quiz, go to researchadjacent.com/quiz or again, I will put a link in the show notes. If you do try it out, I would love to know if you think the result that you get. So I’m I’m still tweaking it behind the scenes. I’d love to know if the result you get you think is a good match. And if you don’t, please let me know, and that will help me to figure out how we can change it. But yeah, go and try out the quiz.
Sarah McLusky 12:11
And I’m also looking at other ways that we can search and filter the back catalogue, particularly so that you can find episodes that fit exactly with what you’re interested in. So whether you want to find out about particular jobs, maybe it’s people who have got PhDs, people who haven’t got PhDs, people who’ve had to deal with redundancy, whatever it might be, I’m going to put some filters in and some new ways to search so that you’ll be able to find them more easily.
Sarah McLusky 12:41
And another thing that I’ve been doing over the last couple of months is revamping my newsletter. So I have had a podcast mailing list for quite a long time, but honestly, up until recently, all I did was I just sent out a notification when there was a new episode. But what I’ve started to do now is that on the in-between week when there’s no podcast episode coming out, I send an email which gives my three top takeaways from the most recent guest. So that’s something that, even if you haven’t had you know, might help you to decide whether it’s worth listening to the episode if you haven’t done already. And I will start to incorporate other insights too. So some of the other things, as I say that that I’ve started to learn from the guests I work with. So if you’re not signed up, there is a box on every web page. So if you go to any page on the website, you’ll find a little sign up box there. And you can also use the link in the show notes of any episode of the podcast as well
Sarah McLusky 13:44
And slightly website adjacent is that if you have recently decided to go onto the BlueSky social media chat platform, you can come and find me there too. Just search for research adjacent, I’m as I think a lot of people, I’m kind of interested to see how BlueSky evolves. I’m not sure I was never the most Twittery person in the first place. I can see it’s very like Twitter, and I’ll be interested to see how it evolves, but I think I’ll still mainly be hanging out on LinkedIn, but definitely, if you are on BlueSky, come and say hello there.
Sarah McLusky 14:21
So what else? Well, I think, as I mentioned before, I am fundamentally an educator. It’s one of the reasons I think I went into communications. And so when people started telling me about all the challenges they were having and how hard it was to access professional development, I did think maybe that is something that I could help with, because, after all, I’ve got all these stories, all these case studies, and also 25 years of experience myself. So the first thing that I have done, I have mentioned this before I mentioned it. I think. Did I mention in the last episode, I have started writing a book. It’s going to be a kind of research adjacent careers handbook. It hasn’t got a definite name yet, but we shall see. It will include an overview of all the different research adjacent roles and employers who are out there. It will include some advice on applying for research adjacent jobs drawn from the literally hundreds of applications I’ve read interviews. It’s probably, it’s probably 1000s of applications. Actually, I’ve been on hundreds of job interview panels, and so yeah, and then navigating some of those challenging situations that come up when you’ve got your foot in the door, as I was talking about earlier, with the special series that’s coming up in the episodes. So the book is going to include case studies and advice drawn from both my podcast guests and my own experience. It’s currently about half written, and I am hoping that if I go public with it, it will help me to get it finished. It will probably be self published, because I’m quite impatient, and I’m hoping maybe it’ll come out sometime, maybe sometime next year. We shall see. At some point, I will be looking for test readers. So if that’s something that you would be interested in doing, please make sure that you are on the mailing list, because that is where I will go to offer the opportunity to be a test reader. I’ll also try and share some updates of how things are going.
Sarah McLusky 16:25
And if you can’t wait until the book comes out, then I do have something that is available now for support. I have started creating some training and professional work development workshops aimed specifically at some of these challenges that current and aspiring research adjacent professionals are facing. In the last year, I was approached by both Leeds and Bath Universities to run just general, a general kind of career navigation workshop for research adjacent professionals where I unearthed some of these challenges that I’ve been mentioning, and it really helped me to understand the pain points that people have got. And I’ve also done a couple of workshops on reframing resilience for PhD students and postdocs, which also is an area came out of a podcast episode I did in 2023on resilience, and not the kind of toxic I know some people hate the word resilience because it’s just framed as dealing with putting up with awful stuff. And I am not into that at all. So yeah, so I’ve done a couple of workshops on them. And so basically, what I’ve done is that now these workshops and some others, which I’ll tell you about in a minute, are available to book so I can come to your organization and do these for you and your colleagues. They can be delivered online or in person, and on the website they are on the page researchadjacent.com/support, is the page where you’ll find them on the website.
Sarah McLusky 18:03
Just to give you a bit of an overview, though, of what is on offer for anybody considering a career change, that might be PhD students, early career researchers, and anybody else, I’ve got workshops which include, I love the title of it. I’m quite pleased with the title of this one fantastic research adjacent jobs and where to find them. I’ve already got that booked in for Robert Gordon University next year, understanding the research adjacent recruitment process and then also reimagining your future, which is a general kind of career navigation type workshop. For those of you who are already in research adjacent roles I know that current development opportunities can be sparse, but if you can persuade your organization to put some budget towards it, I do have workshops and some of those big challenges that I’ve mentioned that come up again and again, so like progression, imposter experiences, influencing others and resilience. If you are interested in any of those, I would love to work with you. So please do get in touch for a chat. And as I said there, I know that research adjacent professional development, is rarely a budget employer, a budget priority for employers. So if there is enough demand, I might offer some of these workshops as online and open to anybody. So individuals could book in. If that is something you’d be interested in, let me know, because it would depend on whether there were enough people who are up for it.
Sarah McLusky 19:38
And then last but not least, are my freelance friends, and a wonderful part of the podcast has been connecting with other self employed research adjacent professionals. A few people that I was chatting to had mentioned that they would like more ways to connect with each other. So in October, I held an exploratory online networking meeting, and honestly, I was genuinely amazed at the response almost as soon as I and I just did like I literally did. So if you didn’t see it, it’s because I kept it fairly low key. I did one LinkedIn post, and I did one post to a couple of email lists that I’m in, and from that, I got, almost immediately, people started booking in. I got 80 people signed up for the workshop. About 40 of them turned up on the day. Others who couldn’t make it on the day, saying that it’s something that they really thought was were lacking. So seems to be a real gap in what’s out there, and that led me to create the Research Adjacent Community. Now the Research Adjacent Community is a private online space which is hosted in a particular kind of community driven software called circle, and it’s early days at the moment, I haven’t really publicly advertised it that much. I’ve only been advertising this to the people who came to the online networking meeting. But here we are. I’m going public with it now. So we have monthly catch up calls at the moment. This is what there is at the moment. I think it’s going to evolve. We have monthly catch up calls, share things like contract opportunities, and there are also opportunities to discuss the realities of freelance life with people who get it. So just a couple of days ago, there was a question come up about a change in, you know, university procurement practices, and one of our members was able to come in and get some really quick advice on that. So that’s the kind of thing that we talk about there. If you are self employed, do come and join us. We have our next online catch up on the 10th of January. That again, once you’re in you’ll get a Zoom link so you can come and join that. And hopefully it’s looking like we might be able to do an in person meet up in York in February, which would be fantastic. Now that community, at the moment, is only for self employed people. If there is demand for something like this, more widely, I might be able to open it up, but I’m still, as you can probably tell, things are evolving.
Sarah McLusky 22:22
I’m still working out what people want and need, and some of the things that I’ve been learning about what freelancers need, means that I have got some other plans as well. So one thing I’m planning to do to help support the members of the research Jason freelancers community is to create an online public directory of freelancers and small businesses who offer services in support of research. And so creating that directory will make it easier for research organizations to find them, easier for them to get hired. Everybody gets more work. Research organizations get better support. So it feels like it should be a win win for everybody. So that is something that’s in the pipeline as well. And I am also planning to create a guide, or course of some kind for new research adjacent freelancers to help them to navigate this weird and wonderful world.
Sarah McLusky 23:26
So now that I’ve said it all out loud, that is a lot, and it is going to keep me busy in 2025 but I do hope that there are things there which sound like they will be useful. I’ve tried to make sure that there is something there for everybody in the research adjacent community, more broadly, not just that online community and whatever career stage that you’re at. So thank you for listening to the end. I do feel like this episode in particular has just been me emptying my brain.
Sarah McLusky 24:00
Don’t forget to sign up for the mailing list, as that is the best way for me to stay in touch with you. And if you don’t currently follow me on social media, then come and find me there. It’s @researchadjacent, almost everywhere, mainly LinkedIn, me personally, I am @SarahMcLusky again, mainly LinkedIn. Do the quiz. Join the freelance community, if they sound like they might be right for you. Get in touch if you want me to come and do some training for you or your colleagues. Send me your questions or suggestions, and most importantly, please continue to join me in 2025 as we travel along this research adjacent journey together. Happy New Year and I’ll see you next time.
Sarah McLusky 24:48
Thanks for listening to Research Adjacent. If you’re listening in a podcast app, please check your subscribed and then use the links in the episode description to find full show notes and to follow the podcast. On LinkedIn or Instagram. You can also find all the links and other episodes at www.researchadjacent.com. Research Adjacent is presented and produced by Sarah McLusky, and the theme music is by Lemon Music Studios on Pixabay. And you, yes you, get a big gold star for listening right to the end, see you next time.
