REBECA PRACTICE is a tool that brings the opportunity to early-career researchers to explore professional roles other than the academic researcher role. This tool will allow users to perform tasks that professionals at different job positions perform regularly. This, together with a narrative that creates a role play scenario, will simulate a job position.

By practicing you will learn about a professional role, you will become aware of necessary skills and attributes need to excel in these tasks, and, most importantly, you will learn about your preferences towards it.

The purpose of this experience is not to upskill or evaluate readiness for a profession. The intention is that you experience a profession in a simulated scenario, helping you to decide if you like or not a profession based in their daily activities, and serving the ground and effectively direct your future steps in career exploration.

Instructions to complete each practice case

When accessing the practice case through the available links in this page, you will be already in the practice case. It is important that you follow the sequence of appearance to perform the tasks, because, in many cases, the tasks follow a narrative, or tasks built on the results of previous task.

The composition of the practice case will be as follow:

First, you will find an introduction that put in context the role within society and the labour market of the professional that you are about to practice. Please, read this section carefully, as there would be also details about working conditions, diversity and sub roles of the professional role that can help you to understand better the profession.
Second, you will find a section that tells you who you are, it means, the role you are going to play in this simulated scenario.
Third, you will find if you need previous requisites to complete the practice case. They are usually specific field knowledge or technical competencies that, without them, the case can become difficult to practice.
Finally, you will encounter the tasks. In each task, you will find a small introduction needed to put you in context or provide you with needed information to perform the task. Then you will find in bold letter “ACTION”. This is the action you are required to perform. To do so, you will be provided with needed material in downloadable documents or urls that leads to webpages.
Occasionally, you will find with other two type of information: notes and tip form the expert. NOTES are important information needed to perform the tasks. TIP FORM THE EXPERT are details that help you to understand better the context of what you are doing.
When finish the sequence of tasks, we recommned to reflect on the experience using the questions that are at the end of practice case
You will also find a section with further information for you to check if you want to know more about the profeesion.

Important information

No one is going to check how much you spent in each task, neither to check or evaluate any outcome. The amount of time spent and how thoroughly you perform the practice cases will impact in your exploring process. You also decide the pace that you want to complete the cases. Depending on your dedication, practice cases can take from 2 hours to days. There is no need to perform all the tasks in one go. As much you experience, as much you will learn about your preferences. It is up to you to take out of the most of this experience.

You could also experience thoughts or feelings of insecurity about your performance, it means, is the outcome of task that you performed sufficiently well done? Bear in mind that the quality of the outcome is not what it is important. To produce high quality outputs in some of the tasks, real professionals take months, are working in a team and are provided with training.