One thing about working in research support rather than in straight research is that you get to collaborate with a wide variety of researchers. I must have worked with several hundred over the years and they stretch dimension wise across faculty, gender, age and experience. I have seen anyone from undergraduates doing their research project to very senior academics indeed. Let me now state the obvious: they were all different and long may that continue because there difference makes the savour of the job I do.
The thing is there is coming to be believed that a researcher is a researcher is a researcher and that you can interchange one researcher for another. This is mistaking one small truth for a different truth indeed. The thing I will grant them is that a fair number of research skills are generic. The skill to locate appropriate literature (information), the ability to cite literature properly, the design of experiments, the use of statistics, write up research accurately and clearly and even the approaches to Qualitative analysis are actually fairly similar wherever you come across them. So are the thoroughness, the ability to concentrate on detail and the ability to self-motivate and self manage. The first list is taught, along with numerous other research tasks; the second list I suspect is by natural selection. You simply do not survive in academia without them.
That said I have never ever given the same advice to two different academics. Even in the extreme case of masters students in Nephrology where two students were often answering two very closely related questions from the same data set. The reason being that as far as I was concerned the big problem was to push their level of understanding that bit further than they were at present and that they really should be able to interpret their results. I am pretty sure with some of them I could have shown them complex techniques, they would have gone away and done them and not understood the results. My response was therefore shaped not just by the research question but by the abilities and understanding of the researcher. No two researchers bring quite the same combination of skills generic or otherwise to a research problem. The path therefore of the research is partly formed by what skills they have.
Secondly a researcher nearly always is powered by shall we say a curiosity. Now do not imagine this as some mild sort of interest, the sort of query you might ask after the son or daughter of an acquaintance. This is completely the other end of the scale usually. Perhaps it is better to say they are pathologically curious, questions are rarely idle and quite often when they find one that is satisfying they feel a compulsion to push it forward. I have seen senior professors literally bouncing on their chairs when an answer comes into sight or an intuition works out. Now it is this sort of curiosity that really pushes the research. With a doctoral student it normally fairly tightly focused on their immediate research problem, with more mature researchers the focus is more general and less prescriptive, there maybe half a dozen questions they are working on or they may well seek employment with a range of different focuses but the important question is does tackling this issue interest me.
This second is important to grasp, the fact is researchers enjoy recognition, like to well paid and often quite like being a bit of a celebrity but there prime motivational driver is often this curiosity. You will find researchers working longer hours, in poorer conditions for less financial reward than they could have got elsewhere simply because being where they were allowed them to follow that curiosity. A researcher may turn down a substantial promotion if it would lead them into an area of research that does not interest them. Forcing a researcher to go against their passionate curiosity, is often the best way to upset a researcher and get a drop in their productivity. It may also be the best way to stop the research.
This does not mean researchers can't be directed. Most people's even doctoral students have a wide enough curiosity that it can be directed. If one line looks more profitable than another then they are more than willing to follow it. Also research interests overlap, we know this it is why we have research teams and research communities. Alright so they are largely the Academic equivalent to Trainspotter congresses but they still have shared interests they are passionate about. Therefore there should be several researchers who could fill any research job. So it is a matter of picking the best for that role.
However it is a bad idea to have someone employed for one research role and then because of situations to instead place them into a second role where they do not fit. Early in my time at this University I ended up "supervising" John, he was a doctoral student, on his third supervisor as previous two had left. The first irc was a supervisor of choice but the second got him off to measure airborne chalk level deposits around various quarries, in order to measure the impact of super quarries on the environment. This he did but his heart was not in it. The third supervisor was disinterested He eventually came to me to do statistics on a survey he had devised and carried out himself at his own expense and involving a lot of time and effort on his part. The statistics were pretty easy and simple but as he came repeatedly to me he started to talk of other parts of the survey where people had given free text to answer questions. These free text questions had elicited a highly complex response (including drawings and such). It was in looking at these that he was finally able to assess the way people thought about the countryside surrounding the quarries and began to understand what impact further quarries might have. Now I have no doubt another researcher would have found ways to use the metering of the dust but that was not where John was and it largely became a wasted year for him.
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