Free to research?

News of a forthcoming conference and some collated resources, all for free!

It’s been almost 4 months now since my book, The Career Professionals’ Guide to Research* was published. If you haven’t heard me speaking about the book and the importance and value of career practitioner-led research yet, I will be the keynote speaker at the National Research Conference for Careers Practitioners, taking place online on Wednesday 18 February 2026.  For the first time, this conference will be completely free to attend.

The importance of things being free is what I am here to talk about in this post. When writing my book, my editor and I laughed about my imagined tagline for selling the book to readers. In short, this was: “It’s cheaper than doing a course.”

Something that has long concerned me about practitioner-led research, and which I cover in my book, is how the costs for research, particularly in the early days, are so often borne by the freelance researcher themselves. This is in a range of ways; from training (perhaps at university level), to gaining access to resources held behind paywalls, through to undertaking research in your own unpaid personal time, and finding the resources in further time and money to disseminate the findings, such as at events and conferences.

At least with the initial aspect, relating to training, free resources are available. If you are seeking more advanced or specific support to develop your research skills, I have added a new section onto my LinkTree / Website listing open access resources for practitioner-researchers. This is a work-in-progress, so if you know of anything you feel could be added to this list, please let me know by posting in the comments.

In a future post, I will be unpicking the wider topic of research costs and access to resources in more detail. I can reassure any new researcher that this is very much a concern of academics and practitioners alike. Unfortunately, we’re all still at the stage of offering ideas to counter barriers, rather than having a magic solution. However, what I hope will offer reassurance is that at the end of 2025 I left my full-time, permanent academic role as a senior lecturer within a university. This was for a number of reasons, but one of them was to fulfil the aim of having more time to conduct independent research–which is entirely possible outside of the confines of academia.

*If you are interested in purchasing my book, please do look out for occasional publisher's and affiliate's discounts. Currently you can receive 25% off your next order when you sign up to the Trotman Newsletter via the website.

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