Encourage more researchers to gain industry experience, says NCUB

Although I am very supportive of the sentiments in this article, with the academic system as it is there is little prospect of success. As an engineering student in the 1980s, most of my lecturers had industrial experience. Now, with a large research CV being a prerequisite to an interview, this is not the case. I spent some time in a commercial job and thus broke my research record. As a result, I had to work my way up from low-ranked universities to the Russell Group despite a Cambridge PhD. There are no longer many companies doing blue skies work as was the case when I was young, so in a system that values publications and especially research income, there are not enough suitable placements. There seems to be little true understanding of the value of universities interacting with industry unless it can add to the bottom line. Many of the university administrators have also not spent time outside universities and also need secondments or something similar. It would certainly be useful to have industrialists spend some time in universities too since my experience is that they are not always familiar with the reality of the modern academic environment.

Would be great if academics were allowed to work with industry. Sadly, this would be the death knell of the career of an academic who chose to do so. Any work that is not REF related is dismissed as 'irrelevant. For those of us who began our career in industry before moving to academia, the refusal to recognise the benefits of collaboration with industry as opposed to churning out 4* REF papers is a sad reality. Still, we live in hope, so maybe one day such collaborations on their own will be rewarded as a contribution to research.