What’s next for RMAs?
Preparing today’s RMAs for tomorrow’s challenges
Welcome to a web page accompanying the poster with the same title at EARMA's Annual Conference 2026 in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
On this page, you can view and download the poster (below), and access supplemental material on real-life experience of developing training for research managers.
1 | Introduction: Competence
Research management has increasingly been recognised as a profession in its own right. With this recognition has come an important effort to define the competencies required for effective research support and administration.
Frameworks such as RM Comp have helped clarify the knowledge and skills needed at different stages of a research management career. They provide an essential foundation and have played an important role in strengthening the profession.
For early-career research managers, structured training in technical knowledge and operational skills is indeed fundamental: understanding funding systems, managing projects, supporting researchers, and navigating institutional processes.
Competence is built.
But for most research managers, competence isn't enough; something more and else is necessary to be a successful professional.
2 | Professional Judgement
The most difficult challenges in research management are rarely solved by procedures alone. They arise in situations where there is no single correct answer, for example: balancing compliance requirements with researcher needs, navigating institutional politics, or deciding how best to support ambitious but risky ideas.
Here, professional growth depends less on acquiring further competence and more on developing professional judgement.
Such professional judgement develops through reflection on experience, through dialogue with peers, and through the careful analysis of complex situations. It cannot be reduced to a checklist, and it's very difficult – we believe it's actually impossible – to learn by lectures, exercises or online learning; it can only be achieved through peer interaction.
3 | Developing training – RMIT as an example
The Research Manager Intensive Training (RMIT) programme was created in response to this need.
RMIT is designed as a structured environment in which research managers can reflect on practice, analyse real professional dilemmas, and learn from each other’s experience. Through case-based work, peer learning, intensive residential formats, and a hackathon design, the programme creates the trust and openness needed for meaningful professional exchange.
Participants do not simply gain new knowledge: they refine how they think about their role, their responsibilities, and the wider research system in which they operate.
In this sense, RMIT is more than a training programme: it is a space for professional formation.
As the profession of research management continues to evolve, such reflective spaces will become more and more important. Competencies may define the contours of the profession, but it is professional judgement that ultimately shapes its practice.
