Room for everyone’s talent

Nation-wide programme

The nation-wide Recognition & Rewards programme was presented in 2019 with a position paper entitled Room for everyone’s talent. In this paper, knowledge institutions and research councils (Universities of the Netherlands (UNL), the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), the Netherlands Federation of University Medical Centres (NFU), the Netherlands Organisation for Health Research, and the Dutch Research Council (NWO)) defined the requirements for achieving a better balance in recognizing and rewarding researchers and staff in academia.

Since then, a large number of organizations, including the UG, have joined hands to implement the ‘new’ system of recognition and rewards.

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Objectives of nation-wide programme

The objective of the programme is to thoroughly modernize the system of recognition and rewards in academia. Academic achievements should be assessed from a broader perspective, making allowance for the identified key areas, i.e. teaching, research, impact, and leadership. This calls for a number of changes. The structure of career pathways has to become more dynamic and diverse, more focus needs to be placed on research and academic quality, and academics should be assessed based on their own performance as well as that of their team. Open science is encouraged and effective academic leadership will become a focus area.

Recognition and rewards in practice 

Since the presentation of the position paper in 2019, strides have been made to implement the new system of recognition and rewards in academic practice. Every participating teaching institution, including the UG, has, for instance, formed its own Recognition and Rewards Committee and developed a vision for its particular organization. In addition, various experiments and pilots were undertaken to implement initiatives in the area of recognition and rewards. A new roadmap by the title of Ruimte voor ieders talent in de praktijk (Room for everyone’s talent in practice) was presented in 2023. This roadmap outlines the follow-up steps that will be needed to embed the system of recognition and rewards in actual processes and instruments. 

More information

To find out more about recognition and rewards in academic practice, please consult the Recognition & Rewards website for background information, stories, videos, news items, and events. 

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