Soft and Technical Skills Education

The PhD Career Plan at IMB‑CNM is built around a structured and progressive training pathway that combines scientific excellence with comprehensive professional development. Within the framework of the María de Maeztu Unit of Excellence, doctoral researchers benefit from advanced scientific and technical training designed to strengthen their expertise in micro‑ and nanotechnologies. This includes specialized courses, hands‑on laboratory experience, and participation in interdisciplinary seminars and workshops, all aimed at fostering a deep understanding of state‑of‑the‑art methods and emerging technologies. The institute places a strong emphasis on cultivating research autonomy, interdisciplinarity, and the capacity to deliver high‑impact scientific results, ensuring that PhD candidates acquire the competencies necessary to address complex societal and technological challenges.

In parallel, IMB‑CNM integrates a robust set of transferable‑skills activities to support long‑term career development. These include mentorship, training in research management, communication, leadership and innovation, as well as participation in institutional seminars, conferences, and collaborative initiatives. The goal is to prepare PhD researchers not only for academic careers, but also for roles in industry, technology transfer, public research agencies and innovation‑driven sectors. By fostering a dynamic and international research environment, the institute ensures that young scientists develop both scientific excellence and the professional versatility required to thrive in today’s global research landscape.

Effective research data management is a fundamental component of the PhD training pathway at IMB‑CNM, ensuring that junior researchers develop the skills required to handle scientific data responsibly, efficiently, and in alignment with international standards. By learning to navigate the full data lifecycle—from creation and organization to analysis, sharing, and long‑term preservation—PhD students strengthen the rigor, transparency, and reproducibility of their work. With an emphasis on FAIR principles, open science, GDPR compliance, ethical considerations, and intellectual property equips participants with the tools needed to manage datasets securely and sustainably. Through practical training in storage strategies, data cleaning, validation, and quality criteria, researchers gain a robust understanding of how well‑managed data contributes not only to their own scientific outcomes but also to the collective advancement of knowledge within IMB‑CNM and the broader research community.

Throughout their career, scientists will need to develop a more analytical and reader-focused approach to scientific writing. How to structure a manuscript and answering the relevant questions is a knowledge that has to be acquired during the PhD path.

IMB-CNM is organizing Scientific Writing workshops to give their students the following tools: 

• Gain a deeper understanding of the structure of scientific papers and the purpose of each section.
• Learn how to create expectations in the reader and deliver on them.
• Move from a passive presentation of results to an active scientific argument.
• Develop a global framework for conceptualizing the entire publishing process.
• Identify common language and clarity problems in scientific writing and practice intuitive editing techniques to address them.
• Explore how AI tools can effectively support the writing process.