Early career training and development in metrology

Project Description

EURAMET members and associates have put in place significant activity in postgraduate training and PhD research in metrology, in collaboration with universities and industries. These activities range from specific support to research activities of trainees, provision of research laboratories to students, organisation of, and teaching in specialised courses, etc. In most cases, formal agreements with universities were established to jointly manage the award of PhD and postgraduate qualifications.

TC-IM has established a Working Group to collate and monitor this kind of actions and promote collaborations among the EURAMET members/associates to strengthen the high-level education and training in metrology. A questionnaire was recently prepared by the Working Group and circulated by the EURAMET Secretariat to get information from the members/associates. The replies have provided a clear view of the present situations in each country, and needs to support these national initiatives at European level.

Following that, coordinating actions among the EURAMET members/associates is expected to boost PhD and postgraduate activities and their impact (including the development of recognised metrology curricula), and make them more visible and inspirational at the European level. Actually, this type of action is aimed at improving the training of early career researchers in the field of metrology, favouring their entry into metrology labs, and, more widely, to expand a “metrology culture” for technicians developing their career within industries, testing laboratories and services.

This coordination activity with the support of the EURAMET Secretariat could as well complement EURAMET Capacity Building and Knowledge Transfer activities (incl. e-training platform) and influence more internal and external stakeholders: NMIs, DIs, academia, industry, related ministries (education, research, industry).

Developing the metrology knowledge of emerging EURAMET members will bridge the capacity gap, enabling them to serve their customers and levelling up overall measurement science knowledge and know-how among EURAMET Members and related countries.

This additional building block to the Capacity Building actions, tools and instruments will contribute to support EURAMET Strategy 2030.

To establish structured and continuous actions to support, promote and extend the PhD and postgraduate activities in metrology training of the EURAMET member countries.

General objective:

To establish structured and continuous actions to support, promote and extend the PhD and postgraduate activities in metrology training of the EURAMET member countries.

Specific objectives:

• to create and manage a specific area within the EURAMET website/webtools to promote activities and initiatives of the EURAMET member countries related to PhD and postgraduate training in metrology. This aims to constitute a unified European access point for information related to high-level training in metrology (see the attached scheme for example)
• to define a way of keeping a continuous link with the contact persons in the EURAMET member countries responsible for PhD and postgraduate activities in metrology
• to analyse possible extensions of national PhD and postgraduate initiatives through coordinated actions among EURAMET member countries
• to promote metrology related courses for PhD and postgraduate students at the European level
• to assist the mobility of PhD and postgraduate students among the metrology laboratories
   

In the future, to evaluate the feasibility of establishing a PhD and postgraduate certification in metrology at the European level also through a network with universities.

Progress Report 2023-03-24

The project has focused its activity on the preparation of a mock-up for a possible web page structure to publish the information related to PhD/Postgraduate activities in which EURAMET Partners are involved together with National Universities and other training bodies.

This draft is the result of a survey collecting info about the typologies of activities that are running in the EURAMET NMIs/DIs on this topic.
A procedure for regularly collecting data from the NMIs/DIs (through established Point of Contact, indicated by the TC-IM members) and preliminary rules for managing these data was established. EURAMET drafted a workflow for sharing information on EURAMET’s Social Media accounts.

The activity was carried out in cooperation with the Capacity Building Officer and the EURAMET Secretariat. At the moment, the project is waiting for the availability of resource from EURAMET side to enable the technical implementation of the platform within the EURAMET website.

It was agreed to start with the dissemination of some information (e.g. new calls at the national levels) through EURAMET Social media, while waiting for the implementation of the entire platform. The procedure to implement this first step was agreed on 14 April 2023 with the EURAMET Communication Manager.