Mission and Vision - A Critical and Supportive Approach

The aim of the consulting and training services is to help you to better understand and overcome the challenges and problems of doctoral education, and to provide outstanding quality in establishing doctoral schools and conducting doctoral supervision.

The approach is critical in the sense that training and counselling are starting from your institutional and personal demands, challenges and worries, from an analysis of organizational and social influences, of lacking information, knowledge and skills which are preventing to further improve good and successful practices.

And it is critical because we first have to understand what causes flawed advice, misleading suggestions and practices. Quick and easy recipes, searching for checklists with tips and tricks are not helpful.

The aim is to better understand the reasons for problems and failures as well as the presuppositions, the real success conditions of establishing and managing doctoral schools, and of developing outstanding research supervision. Only on the basis of a detailed analysis of the field and its cases are we able to identify and to create a systematic of helpful attributes, criteria, procedures and tools which enable to perform very well.

The approach is supportive in the sense of going beyond the notion to be effective as doctoral school manager or supervisor. It focuses on supervision not only in the sense of professional occupational advice and training but also in the sense of clinical supervision, of being helpful to overcome crisis and problems and to be a coach for life and profession. We are seeing the result of doing a PhD nowadays not only in outstanding research, in an excellent thesis but also in the whole person with all of her or his outstanding skills and capabilities.          

The aim is to help you to create an outermost attractive research environment and productive and supportive supervision culture in order to perform as a very much interesting partner in international cooperation and competition. These skills, service and support orientation are not a contradiction to scientific excellence. In contrary both orientations turn out to be a presupposition for each other.

The overall objective is to assure a very high quality of doctoral education, to help you to educate and to train doctoral candidates and supervisors, doctoral school managers and university heads in continuously developing the PhD, and to successfully communicate to society and industry how highly appreciated and useful the outstanding analytical and practical skills and competences are which PhD holders have acquainted by doing a PhD in the newly structured doctoral schools.