METEOR workshop strengthens transversal skills in doctoral education
On 1 June 2026, the METEOR JYU team delivered the workshop “Transversal Skills in Doctoral Education” as part of the EDUPSY-Doc Doctoral Research Summer School at the Faculty of Education and Psychology, University of Jyväskylä.
Led by Prof. Terhi Nokkala, Dr Josephine Lau and Dr Abdul Kadir Khan, the session brought doctoral researchers together to explore how transversal skills can strengthen researcher training and prepare early-career researchers for different professional pathways.
Closing the skills gap in doctoral education
The workshop addressed a core challenge for doctoral education: the gap between competences traditionally developed in academic training and the skills increasingly required in non-academic and cross-sector career contexts.
This focus directly reflects METEOR’s wider mission to support doctoral candidates and early-career researchers through innovative, collaborative and participatory training. By connecting skills development with real-world tasks, METEOR aims to make doctoral education more interdisciplinary, more socially engaged and more responsive to complex societal challenges.
Learning through a policy simulation
A central part of the session was a hands-on group exercise simulating policy evaluation work. Participants responded to a fictional tender issued by the Ministry of Education and Culture and role-played as experts and consultants preparing a research proposal.
Working in teams, the participants addressed the educational, social, economic and political implications of a fictional policy change. The task required them to combine methodological design, stakeholder engagement, risk management, budgeting, project management, collaborative teamwork and communication skills.
The active engagement and positive feedback from participants underline the relevance of transversal skills training in doctoral programmes. METEOR will continue to develop and share training resources that support innovative pedagogies and strengthen doctoral researchers’ career readiness at JYU and beyond.
By connecting doctoral education with real-world policy evaluation tasks, METEOR turns transversal skills into practical competences that researchers can apply across academic and non-academic career pathways.
The article can be linked to the original JYU item and the METEOR project website to guide readers towards further information and related training resources.
Author: METEOR Project Team
Links
Keywords
METEOR, doctoral education, transversal skills, EDUPSY-Doc, University of Jyväskylä, early-career researchers, policy evaluation, Horizon Europe
