On January 21st, 2015 IRTA was awarded the “HR Excellence in Research” award from the European Commission.
The award reflects our commitment adopt the European Charter for Researchers and a Code of Conduct for Recruitment of Researchers. These two documents were created in 2005 by the European Commission to ensure a successful relationship between researchers and employers and recognise the value of all forms of mobility as a mean to enhance the professional development of researchers.
IRTA has firmly established as a priority the development of a solid HR policy, by fostering the training and dissemination of knowledge to enhance the professional development. Overall, aiming to turn research into an attractive professional career by creating a labour market that is transparent, attractive and open to the researchers at an international level.
HRS4R Action Plan
In July 2014 IRTA started defining the IRTA HR Action Plan. This process was leaded by the IRTA HRS4R working group, which was formed by Researchers, PhD students, Human Resources and chaired by the Scientific Director.
The internal analysis consisted of:
- Legislation analysis
- Survey sent to the IRTA staff
- Discussion of the results on the HRS4R working group
- Feedback from Head of Programs.
The internal analysis aimed measure IRTA’s initiatives against the Charter and Code principles. As a result, the IRTA Action Plan 2015-2018 was developed, which was approved by the external experts of the European Commission and published in IRTA’s web page. Two of the most highlighted actions were IRTA’s Ethical Code and IRTA’s Equal Opportunities Plan.
All the actions included in IRTA’s Action Plan are focused on reinforcing the HR strategy which consists in providing a unique an specialised training programme to attract international talent and create a unique environment for our researchers to develop their careers.
The Action Plan has been become an indispensable tool to continuously improve our HR Strategy and is the driving force to further analysis the needs of our staff.
Self-assessment report
On September 2017 IRTA the very positive feedback on the self-assessment report validated by the European Commission. This report contained information about the evolution of the HRS4R Action Plan and the status of each action, as well as new actions planned for the following years. To create the report, an internal survey was performed across all IRTA staff and followed by meetings with IRTA HRS4R working group.
The results of the survey can be found in the self-assessment report, as can an Annex with the OTM-R Checklist. Finally, we want to thank all IRTA staff that was involved in the survey as well as the IRTA HRS4R working group that gave a very valuable input in order to promote and develop a new action plan.
Due to COVID-19 problems, the next evaluation will take place in 2021, and until then IRTA will continue to implement all the new actions.
HRS4R Actions
In this section, you can find valuable information documents about the HR Policies of IRTA:
Human Resources policy
IRTA training Plan
