UKRI is running a pilot through several funding opportunities to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach to people and teams. The funding opportunity will state whether it is part of this pilot.
The pilot aims to consider support for people and teams more effectively in applications and assessment. To do this we have some additional guidance on how people and teams will be assessed for pilot opportunities.
The pilots are part of our people and teams action plan, which is designed to strengthen support for people and teams and incentivise organisations in receipt of UKRI funding to consider the development of their research and innovation (R&I) workforce strategically.
Why we are doing it
UKRI supports over 25,000 full-time equivalent of R&I staff directly on grants, many more if indirect costs, facility charges and strategic funding streams are included. Those skilled people and teams design our studies, deliver the R&I work and disseminate the outputs. They are the R&I system and are mission-critical to UKRI. Without them our funding can’t deliver the outcomes we invest in.
Most people and teams we support are employed on funding that falls outside our talent investments, which focus mainly on studentships and fellowships. We face key shortages in digital, technical, specialist and professional skills that aren’t met by these opportunities.
Precarious employment via fixed term contracts linked to research funding is still common, this coupled with narrow criteria of research excellence and a focus on publications leads to siloed and high-pressure working environments which can inhibit creative, curiosity-driven research and the ability of R&I activity to make a meaningful difference to people’s lives. This environment also presents a risk to the quality of research by increasing the likelihood of questionable research practices and inconsistent training provision.
Pilot outcomes
Ensuring our investments build critical specialist and technical capabilities and improves the environments our people and teams work in is essential to producing the most innovative ideas and the highest quality outputs in the most effective and efficient way possible. We want to:
- build cross-cutting technical and specialist capability that can improve productivity, resilience and the quality of research outputs
- diversify staffing models to bake in connectivity and cross-disciplinary working, reduce the reliance on fixed term contracts to mitigate risks to research integrity and improve wellbeing and reduce barriers to inclusion
- build leadership capability in R&I that can inspire, motivate and support increasingly diverse, interdisciplinary and specialist project teams
We aim to explicitly reward a wider ideal of research excellence that recognises:
- the environmental and workforce factors that improve quality and value for money
- skilled people and teams, and secure and resilient R&I capability, as a key outcome of UKRI’s investment
- the difference that outcomes of our investments make, often mediated by the people and teams working on them, over where they are published
Last updated: 6 June 2025