A secretariat undergoing changes
AGRO’s secretariat is changing at present. From providing traditional secretarial services to the researchers, we now have many new tasks that come from either the AU’s central administration or new needs in society.
The secretariat wants to be able to solve the new tasks and to be an active player in the department’s activities, including providing administrative assistance in the execution of the research projects.
Hello and goodbye
The secretariat has shrunk in some areas but also grown in others. During 2022-2023 we have said ‘goodbye’ to some more traditional secretaries whose positions were not all refilled.
Therefore, some tasks have been dropped from the secretariat’s service catalogue, but new ones have also been added.
We have taken on project coordinators to support the researchers in fundraising and project support. This is the case at both AU Flakkebjerg and AU Viborg. These positions have been created to support especially research applications and the first start-up of new projects.
We have also been very involved in building our new degree programme and promoting it in our society. This work will continue in the coming months where AU Viborg will take an active part in events around the country that are aimed at recruiting potential students to our degree programmes. The recruitment will be carried out with external consultants, but we also need to make ourselves more visible to upper secondary schools, HTX and EUX.
What can an AGRO employee expect to receive support for from the secretariat?
The secretariat will continue to assist with a number of administrative tasks, including:
- Case management and administrative support
- Coordination of onboarding of new employees
- Purchase of materials for administrative purposes, including also approval of invoices in IndFak
- Initial HR case management in Emply, etc.
- Planning of events, workshops, etc.
Communication tasks are also a major task in the secretariat:
- The external home page, including project home pages, external news, etc. We will also work on drawing up pages about our long-term experiments (https://agro.au.dk/)
- The intranet, standard pages and news (https://agro.medarbejdere.au.dk/)
- AGRO Biweekly
- Other communication materials and small graphic tasks
The canteen at AU Flakkebjerg is also part of the secretariat, and here we are working on getting a web page and an order form up and running.
Project applications, here we will be able to help with support for e.g.:
- Knowledge of tender texts and requirements from the provider.
- Support and sparring in connection with project ideas and development of partnerships
- Preparation of budgets
- Checking the formal requirements for applications
In addition, in the long term we would like to offer an internal workshop on fundraising for our young and newly appointed researchers.
What is new in the future?
Historically, we have a number of large databases, but it has been difficult to allocate resources to develop and maintain them over the years. In connection with attracting new projects, many funders now require that we can deliver a plan for how data will be handled in the project, and that the department complies with the FAIR principles.
Therefore, in the near future, we will be working on what we find that a Data Manager can contribute in the department.