Your Gateway to Career Growth
Overview
Your career development is the heart of the ERA SHUTTLE project. It includes:
- Secondments at different non-academic sites in Europe, Host institutions, according to your career goals and match of topics (check out opportunities below!)
- Tailored career planning tools for secondees (Gantt charts, SMART goals)
- Ongoing skill assessment and feedback through short surveys
- Support through career tandems and mentoring through peer networking
- Guidance through our Career Development Plan (CDP) template
- A reintegration phase to ensure long-term impact at your home institution
- Sustainability of the project through your new network and future collaborations between academia and industry.
Secondments
As part of our Horizon Europe initiative, secondments provide structured, cross-sectoral training placements abroad for Research & Innovation professionals and Research Manager & Administrators (RMS). Whether you’re a researcher or a RMA, the secondment experience is designed to help you grow, collaborate, and implement new knowledge for when you return back to your home institution.
How do you enter a secondment? It starts with your application to an Open Call at your home university, going through a competitive application with other candidates, and becoming an ERA Talent. This is a process that takes some time and effort, but your university Project Managers are the best to help you with the application process. Before you start an application, become familiar with the secondment opportunities under ERA SHUTTLE.
You probably know about ERASMUS programmes – secondments are very similar, and yet, a bit different at the same time: you will get to go abroad for the purpose of developing your career in a non-academic setting, however only for the offered secondment opportunities, and usually from 3-12 months period, entirely funded by ERA SHUTTLE project budget.
What you’ll do during your Secondment
Every secondee follows a structured journey:
- Pre-Secondment:
- Define your SMART career goals
- Complete the Pre-secondment Survey (readiness, expectations) before you start the secondment
- Start drafting your Gantt Chart (we provide a template)
- Optional: Connect and exchange with your Career Tandem partner on Linkedin Group, who is another Secondee, from the programme
Optional: use our new AI-supported Career Orientation Recommendation Assistant, named CORAí, for role play and self-reflective planning for long-term goal alignment at all stages of the journey
- During the Secondment:
- Engage in skill-building, mentoring, and sectoral exchange
- Complete two Mid-secondment Surveys to track your progress
- Meet key milestones outlined in your CDP template
- Optional: use our new AI-supported Career Orientation Recommendation Assistant, named CORAí, for role play and self-reflective planning for long-term goal alignment at all stages of the journey
- Post-Secondment:
- Write and submit the Post Secondment Report to the Project Managers: this outlines how you plan to implement your new knowledge and skills at your home institution
- Complete the Final Post-secondment Survey about your secondment stay and evaluation
- Optional: use our new AI-supported Career Orientation Recommendation Assistant, named CORAí, for role play and self-reflective planning for long-term goal alignment at all stages of the journey
📌 All outputs must include the acknowledgement of the EU funding you benefited from by including the ERA Shuttle Logo as well as the EU Funding logo at the top of the document/material produced as well as the follow text at the bottom/back:
“This publication was prepared with the support of the project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101130109 (ERA SHUTTLE).”
Secondment Opportunities
Testimonials
How To Apply
📌 All outputs must include the acknowledgement of the EU funding you benefited from by including the ERA Shuttle Logo as well as the EU Funding logo at the top of the document/material produced as well as the follow text at the bottom/back:
“This publication was prepared with the support of the project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101130109 (ERA SHUTTLE).”
Resources & Tools
CORAí – Your AI-Supported Career Development Tool
Want personalised support while building and developing your Career Development Plan (CDP)?
Meet CORAí (Career Orientation Recommendation Assistant), our new AI-supported career development tool, developed for ERA SHUTTLE talents by project partner Schiller&Mertens. CORAí is the improved successor to the previous AI Career Bot, with a stronger focus on data protection and GDPR compliance.
With CORAí, you can:
Set SMART goals tailored to your secondment objectives
Build a Gantt Chart with activities, deliverables and surveys
Define milestones linked to your career and institutional needs
Connect your secondment with your longer-term career development
Reflect and plan how your secondment can benefit both you and your home institution
CORAí supports you in turning your career ambitions into a structured, measurable and meaningful Career Development Plan – and in making the most of your ERA SHUTTLE secondment.
We would like to hear from you
CORAí is currently being introduced as a beta version, and your experience is very valuable to us. As good research practitioners, we invite you to test the tool and share your feedback in our short 4-question beta-tester survey:
Your feedback will help us further improve the tool and ensure that it is genuinely useful for ERA SHUTTLE talents.
Your Career Development Plan (CDP) template
You will build your CDP with:
- SMART goals tailored to your secondment objectives
- A detailed Gantt Chart with deliverables and our surveys
- Milestones linked to your career and institutional needs and for the mutual benefit for your home institution and your career emanating from your secondment
- Optional: Use our CORAi for role play and self-reflective planning for long-term goal alignment at all stages of the journey
This plan ensures your time abroad is structured, impactful, and measurable – we will help you to come closer to your career goals!
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Secondment?
When someone is on secondment, they are temporarily assigned to work in a different role, department, or organisation from their usual employment position. This means that while their primary employment contract remains with their original employer, their day-to-day duties are performed in a new setting. For instance, a research manager from the Research Support Services Directorate at UM might be seconded to for example a CERIC-ERIC research infrastructure site (host institution) to job-shadow a specific aspect of the management of research infrastructure. During this period, they work according to the host institution’s needs but remain an employee of their home university, which continues to handle their salary, benefits, and other employment terms.
What Does Seconded Mean in a Job?
When an employee is ‘seconded’ in their job, it refers to the temporary move from their original work of place and task to a new one in a different ERA Shuttle partner organisation. The key aspect of a secondment is its temporary nature; the employee is expected to return to their original role and organization after the secondment period ends.
Am I eligible to apply for a secondment?
Step-by-step procedure to verify that you are eligible for a secondment:
- You are a researcher or a research manager & administrator (RMA) formally employed at one of the partner Universities.
- Your contract is covering the timeline of your secondment plus the duration of the mandatory return phase. A mandatory return phase is equal to the duration of the secondment, but not more than 12 months.
- You have been employed at UM, UG or UNIST for at least 6 months prior to the application for secondment.
- You have discussed your secondment with your line manager/head of department and obtained their letter of support.
If you are eligible for secondment (see above points), you will be assisted in finding the host institution for your secondment. Kindly note Home University ERA Shuttle contact project managers as per below:
- University of Split:Tonka Petričević [email protected] ; [email protected]
- University of Gdansk: Dominika Butkiewicz at [email protected]
- University of Malta: Dr. Elena Sultana at [email protected]