Category Archives: Skills Development

Sad endings, Mary Poppins and shiny things

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Whether it’s dropping off the keys to my rented damp-ridden, avocado-bathroom-suite-complete-with-kitchen-cupboard-over-the-bathtub flat in Bracknell, leaving my Citroen Saxo with neon yellow and grey interior at the scrap yard because it had a tendency to be a bit of a death trap, or driving away from the boarding kennels as my cat gave me his best Puss in Boots wide-eyed pity face and I trundled off for a three-day conference in Belfast, I hate goodbyes.

So, with only a few short weeks of this KTP left, it’s probably no surprise that I have decided to break a Wisley tradition and not have a leaving do (let’s face it, we all knew it was never really up for debate). I’m going to do a Mary Poppins instead and steal away with my talking umbrella. But, besides wasting time stressing that whisperings in the corridors are preparations to ambush me with tea, cake and the horrifying words “speech, speech”, these remaining weeks have been very busy for the KTP team.

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Come Dine With Me, Sunday afternoons and project management workshops

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Discussing Project Management best practice within RHS Science

Discussing Project Management best practice within RHS Science

I am a great fan of the TV show ‘Come Dine with me’. For those of you who actually have stuff to do on a Sunday afternoon, the basic premise involves a group of strangers rating one another on three course dinners cooked and hosted by each member of the group over a five-day period. The person with the highest overall score at the end of the week wins a £1000 cash prize.  I’d quite like to be on the show but am put off by the fact that:

1) being filmed involves being on the wrong side of the camera all the time

2) my cooking isn’t that great, and

3) I tend not to like strangers wandering around my home, snooping in my cupboards and trying on my clothes

All this aside, if I was to appear on the show, I’d definitely do some early planning to minimise the social ridicule that would ensue if I came last. I’d decide what to cook and write a shopping list (including substitute items in case what I wanted wasn’t in stock). I’d practise the meals well in advance to iron out any problems early on. I’d write a timeline of jobs that needed to be done and would refer to this on the day to make sure I wasn’t late getting food onto plates. In effect, I’d be managing my ‘Come Dine with me’ experience as a project.

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Networking, nibbles and a new prospectus

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RHS Science hosted its second annual PhD symposium in November. An opportunity to develop our growing PhD community- and our links with new and existing collaborative research partners, the event gets everyone together for a catch-up and keeps us all abreast of the exciting research currently ongoing by our PhD students.

Given that our RHS/ Reading KTP is all about boosting the profile of scientific research, I was involved in organising the event and this year, we were lucky enough to be able to welcome students (and their supervisors) from other horticultural research institutions including East Malling Research and Reading, Sheffield and Warwick universities.

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Everything changes

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In my early (and I stress early) high school years, the girls could be split into one of two camps- the ‘Take That’ fan club or the ‘Backstreet Boys’ one.  I clearly remember arriving at school on the day Take That broke up. Friends were huddled together red-faced and teary-eyed, sobbing in classroom corners and whimpering in toilet cubicles.  Those were the ones that made it in- many were simply too distraught.

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Ugly bugs, fair-weather fans and a new face

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 The Plants for Bugs research project keeps us busy – especially during the summer!

 

Unlike universities, where the summer term generally provides academics with more time, more parking spaces, and a more favourable balance between queuing for and eating lunch, the opposite is true in the garden.

Here at Wisley, summer is our busiest period, not just because footfall through the gates increases but also because during these long, warm(ish) months, gardening as a hobby sees a seasonal resurgence.  So, with many of us being unashamed fair-weather fans of our trowels and our hedge shears, it’s not surprising that summer also heralds an increase in the number of enquires to the RHS’ Members Advisory and Diagnostic Services.  Calls, emails and letters querying anything from best practice when trimming wisteria to help identifying the good, the bad and the sometimes exceedingly ugly amongst our garden fauna are answered by our horticultural advisors and scientists.

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Back to school

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As much as it may be cool to say I hated school, didn’t do my homework and never did any revision, it would be a lie. Keen as I may have been though, I wasn’t crazy, so on my last school day I appreciated the fact that I would never again have homework to do or exams to revise for.

Until last week, that is.

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P is for Publishing

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In an earlier post, I mentioned the KTP Training and Development budget which encourages Associates to develop their skills and knowledge to help them now as well as post-KTP. With June 2012 marking two years of our three-year KTP project, I decided to direct more attention to my training and development and, last Sunday, in search of new skills, I headed North.

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Using razors for simplicity

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It’s weird the things you remember from school.

I remember Occam’s razor: when competing explanations are otherwise equal, the simplest one is often the most likely, until evidence proves it otherwise. I also know that this wise philosophy is often misinterpreted to mean that the simplest solution is often the best.  Also committed to memory are the orders of the first ten elements in the periodic table and of the planets in the Solar system based on their distance from the Sun.  I know that the size of a turning effect or moment is dependent on the size of the force applied and on the perpendicular distance from the pivot, and that it is impossible to fold a piece of paper in half more than 7 times, irrespective of its size or thickness.

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Tick Tock

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You’ve looked at your watch about five times in the past hour.  It’s hot and stuffy and the windows have that horrible warm-room condensation they get which leaves you boiling indoors but needing at least 15 layers of clothing to be warm outside. You’ve noticed that the overhead light bulb flickers 16 times a minute. You’re too scared to open a window in case someone thinks you’re asking a question and the person next to you is munching a tuna sandwich and spending an absolute eternity eating crisps ‘quietly’.

We’ve all been there.  Lunchtime seminars. Sometimes you end up feeling that they’ve stolen an hour of your life you’ll never get back.

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Newfound interests

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“Can you tell what it is yet?”

I am, at this very moment, shouting this Rolf Harris catchphrase at the computer screen whilst wielding a wobble board fashioned from an identification key to millipedes.

Those less eagle-eyed among you could be forgiven for mistaking the picture on the left for the iconic image of E.T. and Elliot whizzing across the night sky on a bicycle – all lit up by the glow from  a full moon. It isn’t, and my mention of the key to millipedes was a clue.  In fact, taken through the microscope, this is a picture of a male millipede’s external reproductive organs (known as ‘gonopods’) – important when identifying some species of millipede.

I can honestly say that when I started my KTP eighteen months ago, I didn’t think a millipede’s gonopods would prove so exciting but there we are.  KTP projects, I’ve realised, are great at providing you with lots of new skills. Skills that you may have expected, and others that come as a nice surprise.  Developing project ideas, costing projects, initiating them, managing them, communicating with stakeholders and pitching ideas are all skills that develop through training provided by KTPs, mentoring received from the KTP project team (which includes senior managers and academics from your company and knowledge base) and on-the-job learning. But there will be other skills that Associates pick up which are likely to be more project-specific.

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