22 May 2025
MLE on Research Careers presents its recommendations
The Mutual Learning Exercise (MLE) on Research Careers has successfully concluded on 22 May 2025. The MLE was carried out by the European Commission's Policy Support Facility (PSF and was a year-long initiative supporting Member States in improving the attractiveness and sustainability of research careers across Europe.
Bringing together international experts and national authorities from 16 participating countries (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czechia, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden), the MLE facilitated the exchange of good practices and lessons learned on the implementation of the 2023 Council Recommendation on a European Framework to Attract and Retain Research, Innovation and Entrepreneurial Talents in Europe (RECO), including the new European Charter for Researchers. The discussions were articulated along four themes: recruitment and working conditions; skills and intersectoral careers; enabling policy and legal frameworks; and conditions for balanced talent circulation.
The exercise concluded with 8 recommendations for Member States to implement the RECO and the new Charter:
- National policymakers should put research talent at the heart of R&D investment. The policies should include initiatives to develop more attractive research careers for researchers and implement the 44 recommendations of the RECO. Research organisations should be supported to offer attractive research careers by having access to the necessary financial means and operating in regulatory and policy frameworks aligned with RECO.
- National policymakers should integrate the European Charter for Researchers into R&I policy and provide funding to support implementation by research funders, universities, and research organisations in the public and private sectors.
- Member States should encourage and support research funders, universities, and research organisations to adopt open, transparent, and merit-based recruitment and ensure that the legal and policy framework is conducive to reforms for researcher recruitment.
- Member States should develop long-term national strategies to balance the level of core/baseline and projectbased/competitive funding and stimulate more tenure track-like models and open-ended/permanent contracts to reduce precarity by ensuring adequate national funding and that the legal and policy framework is conducive to such reforms.
- Member States should benchmark researcher salaries against other high-skilled professions across sectors and improve the salaries of researchers as well as strengthen the social protection benefits of researchers and ensure that researchers at all career stages and with all types of contracts have equal access to relevant social protection benefits.
- Member States should support the reform of researcher assessment by ensuring that the legal and policy framework is conducive to reforms for researcher assessment and supporting the adoption and implementation of principles and commitments in the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment by their research-performing and research-funding organisations.
- Member States should adopt a national skills/competence framework for researchers which is aligned with ResearchComp to guide national regulations, policies, and funding for the skills development of researchers and integrate a professional development component and funding for researchers to cover relevant costs into research project grants.
- Member States should promote and develop funding programmes to stimulate and support the interdisciplinary, intersectoral, and international mobility of researchers as well as ensure that the legal and policy framework for mobility is conducive to reforms.
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