At the core of Eurodoc’s mission is advocating for the wellbeing and employment conditions of early career researchers. Employment quality is crucial for health, wellbeing and performance. Nevertheless, early career researchers are often facing precarious employment conditions, resulting in stress, health issues, and financial insecurity.
Eurodoc wishes to acknowledge the importance of having high quality employment for Early career researchers to strive and prosper professionally and personally. For this reason, Eurodoc’s Working Group on Employment Conditions has through the last year been working on a statement with the aim to highlight the importance of setting high quality employment conditions for early career researchers and provide specific recommendations on how to improve employment quality in academia. This final version of the statement is a product based on working group meetings where our members discussed the policies and practices in place but also the challenges early career researchers face in terms of employment conditions around Europe.
The aim has been to highlight that employment quality is multidimensional, thus the statement provides recommendations not only about aspects of the employment relation but also include working conditions and organisational aspects that stimulate a healthy working environment.
Investment in high quality employment for early career researchers is the cornerstone of high quality science, high quality education and societal development. Given its importance, employment quality should be a key priority on European and national policy agendas.
We hope that the “Eurodoc Statement on setting high quality employment conditions for early career researchers” will guide collaborative policymaking and policy implementation among various stakeholders such as governments, high education institutions, research centers, and early career researchers in Europe.
List of authors
This piece was written by:
- Marija Davcheva : https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0766-987X
- Pil Maria Saugmann : https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3548-0134
Editor:
This piece was edited by:
- Anna Pavelieva: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2306-1928