Research technicians are vital to robotics research. They bring technical expertise and practical experience to support and guide academic researchers but the importance of these roles is often overlooked.So, the current situation as a research technician, I think there’s a few flaws. There’s no career progression. If you’re in academia, you can keep carrying on, you can keep going up levels.

There’s kind of a glass ceiling and you can’t get above it very easily.

You don’t know what the next steps are or you don’t know in terms of career progression, what exactly you can become.

Research technicians, there’s a real issue in terms of lack of recognition. Their voices aren’t heard within the research community, and they’re quite invisible, really, given that they’re kind of the heartbeat of what happens within research.

The UK RAS STEPS programme will aim to address all of these issues and improve the landscape across the UK for research technicians.

One of the issues that we want to resolve is career development and progression. UK RAS Steps will provide the support for the professional development of the research technicians through different activities such as training events to grow knowledge of the technical community.

Research technicians can help us standardise code; they can help us promote diversity, inclusivity and equality within the career profession. So the UK RAS Steps programme is going to help deliver all this by the issue of funding calls for task groups to lead workshops, technology challenges develop policy changes and produce white papers. Further to this, we’re going to be promoting international collaboration by funding travel to like-minded institutions to promote that share of knowledge across the technician community internationally.

There’s a real need for a more connected community across research technicians so they’re sharing, learning and supporting each other. So, the network wants to bring together robotics technicians to develop this network. There’ll be a mentoring scheme that will really help research technicians identify what they want and help them to achieve it. So, there’s a huge amount of work and activities that will happen. We’re going to bring together technicians for a celebration with a series of activities, week-long activities, across the UK to really raise the profile and celebrate what technicians do within robotics.

The UK RAS Steps programme will help technicians develop their skills through secondments working with other universities and become more useful in this rapidly advancing world of robotics.

We’re seeing great advances in AI and robotics moving forward, but we mustn’t forget we need the people that can actually deliver the technical skills and the practical experience on these things. So, research technicians are going to be a core part of this and will drive the future.

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