We held our second management meeting at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria (FHO) on 12.06.2018 – 13.06.2018 to solve the last administrative issues and plan the first training week to ensure our newly recruited ESRs will have a smooth project start.
We are already a few months into our project by now. Our main goal up to this point was to recruit 15 highly motivated PhD candidates that will take part in the training network and conduct PERFORM Digital Retail research projects.
Recruitment took some time to ensure an open, transparent, and merit-based process. We are happy with the outcome: we were able to recruit 15 well-qualified ESRs who should start on the 1st of September.
We discussed open issues of recruitment like the PhDs admission process at the universities and visa requirements for the Schengen area as well as Ireland. We are optimistic that all necessary preparations are done and any issues can be solved before the ESRs arrive.We also planed the first training week-long event in October in more details by defining lectures, courses, speakers and material. To ensure a well-organized document management of this material we agreed on the use of Moodle as a training platform. To be able to provide tailored training that fits the individual need of the ESRs, we agreed on a structure of a Personal Career Development Plan. We are sure these measures will provide our ESRs a good training environment.
Also a lot of organisational matters like the committee structure, meeting schedules, document management, reporting, research data management, and outreach activities have been discussed.
Overall it was a very productive and successful meeting and we think we are well prepared for our ESRs to arrive and start their training.