Hello again all
Thanks to everyone who got in touch with me on- and off-list. It seems quite a few are interested in some sort of 'service' although I've no idea what form it would take and will have a chat with Tamasin G off-list and see what she and her chums came up with.
Probably the end-point I want to see isn't so much just a tool available to anyone interested in using it, but more a slight shift in culture so that a person who prefers to work part-time will see a full-time job and feel perfectly happy in applying for just half of it (while being confident that the employer will treat this as quite normal). Whether or not jobseekers need to pair up with someone beforehand I don't know.
We might need to sound out a few employers and see what things look like from an HR and practicalities perspective. It may be that employers are not really thinking in terms of "could this full time job I'm offering be done just as well by employing two part-time folk?" or it could be that they have thought about it and found it doesn't work. Tamasin makes a very good point about the range of skills needed and how two people might be a bit of a bonus. The modern scicommist seems to need multiple higher degrees in science, first-rate writing skills, social media and online community management nous and an ability to rustle up podcasts to be considered accomplished ;)
As to the actual service: initially I wondered if people should flag up on psci-com their interest in finding someone with which to co-apply for a job, but then I realised that this requires sharing more info than many would want, so I think it would have to be quite separate!
However if it's too separate then that doesn't really get the momentum on here for future psci-com joiners to learn of the burgeoning 'full-time job partitioning' that might be going on.
Whatever format this mythic service might take (forum?) I suppose it would be quite nice if jobseekers and job offerers might mingle, in which case people might even want to register pseudonymously in case they don't want to announce to the world that they're looking for a job.
@Judith - I'm not sure if there's going to be much of a market, or even if it could work successfully. My gut feeling is that this sort of thing could work quite well and perhaps moreso in scicomm than in other fields, but I've no evidence.
Jo
Jo Brodie
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Diabetes UK
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