Training: the output that matters is people who can train others

A training system that produces researchers but not supervisors has a horizon of exactly one generation.

Which makes supervisory capacity the output that determines whether a research system continues to exist.

What training must produce

• Independent researchers who can set their own questions.
• People able to supervise others — a separate skill that is rarely taught.
• Methodological competence beyond one technique.
• The ability to evaluate work critically.
• People who remain in research afterwards.

Where pipelines fail

• Producing technicians rather than independent researchers — able to execute, not to design.
• Never teaching supervision, so the next generation improvises.
• Losing people immediately after training.
• Expanding intake beyond supervisory capacity.
• Long completion times consuming capacity.

Building supervisory capacity

• Train people to supervise before they must.
• Use co-supervision so new supervisors learn alongside experienced ones.
• Limit numbers per supervisor to what can be done properly.
• Recognise supervision in workload and assessment, or it gets deprioritised.
• Retain experienced supervisors — they are the constraint.

Developing independence

• Move students from executing to designing during training.
• Let them make decisions and own the consequences.
• Require them to generate a question of their own.
• Reduce direction deliberately over time.
• A student who was never allowed to decide graduates unable to.

Retention

• Training people who then leave the system builds nothing.
• Retention needs positions, funding continuity and working conditions.
• Track five-year retention — this is the indicator that reveals whether training is building capacity.
• Return schemes without positions to return to do not work.

Realistic sequencing

• Supervisory capacity before intake expansion.
• Retention before recruitment.
• Completion quality before completion numbers.
• Expanding faster than capacity produces non-completions, which build nothing and consume everything.

One thing worth remembering

Count how many people can supervise well, not how many students are enrolled.

That number sets the real capacity of a training system — and expanding intake beyond it produces neither researchers nor output, only people who did not finish.

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