Celebrating failures and successes in your research career: Tools and Benefits

Sept 21, 2026, 1pm-2pm, online

To foster central tenets of good research like risk taking, courage, a spirit of innovation, and learning from mistakes, it pays off to make research culture more failure-friendly. It is a community effort to productively handle career setbacks, you don't have to do it alone. 

This interactive webinar explores the “why” and the “how” of celebrating failures and successes in the everyday life of a researcher. Through short lectures and group work, the participants work out what goes right and what goes wrong when you are in this profession, what celebrating failure can look like and what benefits it might have, what resources each of us has to handle our next „career fiasco“ with care, and how to mark small everyday achievements and big milestones alike. 

Registration:

email to postdoc@uni-graz.at

Trainer: 

Johanna Stadlbauer, Head of the Research Careers Campus at the University of Graz. Johanna has a PhD in anthropology and is the co-inventor of the party-workshop Fiasco Fest (alongside psychologist Sabine Bergner), and co-lead of „Fiasco Fest Goes Arqus“, a European project for a more failure-friendly research culture. Find out more about her here:  Johanna Stadlbauer | LinkedIn

Target group: 

all researchers with a PhD, from everywhere in the world :)

Context:

At the Research Careers Campus, every week is PostDoc Appreciation Week - but across the world, for some years now, one week in September is devoted to highlight the contributions of researchers in this specific career stage. For this week, researchers and research institutions, postdoc office coordinators, and research managers come together to create a special workshop programme, public events, and awareness raising for the work of postdocs. The origins of PAW lie with the US-based National Postdoctoral Association. This year is their 17th Annual Celebration. In the UK, PAW has also been around for quite a while, and in 2022 the Postdoc Appreciation Week Germany came into existence.

Now it's the second year that in in Austria, the Postdoc Appreciation Week is jointly organized across the country.

This historical overview shows that investing into this staff group is now a main priority for many universities - also thanks to advocacy efforts of the researchers themselves. Celebration doesn’t replace good working conditions. Our Uni Graz stance towards postdoctoral researcher development has been communiated officially in 2022, when the PostDoc Office was established: 69_2022_PostDocCharta_v4.indd. If you want to join us in celebrating and supporting the incredible contributions of postdocs in academia and beyond. Here's a small selection of what's in store just in the first two days: