Potentially is a learning platform for researcher development.
Graduate schools, doctoral colleges and training partnerships use it to run their provision, map it to the Vitae Researcher Development Framework, and hold the evidence of everything a researcher does — including what they do somewhere else.
Good morning, Sofia
Year 2 · DTP-funded · 3 sessions booked
Coming up View calendar
Provision from every provider 148 open
Progress across the RDF Activities
EarlierThis term
Added to your record This term
One catalogue, every provider
Graduate school, faculty, library, research office and partner institutions, all bookable in the same place.Mapped to the RDF
Activity, provision and evidence mapped to the framework domains — or to your own competency set.A record they take with them
Most doctoral researchers won't stay in academia. What they build here goes with them.A year in a doctoral college, from two sides. Sofia is a second-year researcher. Ruth runs researcher development.
Meet Sofia.
Second year, funded through a doctoral training partnership, teaching two seminar groups, and fairly sure she won't stay in academia after this.
My record
Sofia · Year 2
RDF domains This year
October
She finds out where she actually stands.
Insight Compass asks her to assess herself against the Vitae Researcher Development Framework. It takes twenty minutes and she gets something back straight away: where she's strong, where the gaps are, and the specific sessions in her institution's catalogue that address them.
She books two of them from the results. The needs analysis ends in a booking instead of a document.
November
She books a workshop at another university.
It's DTP provision, run by a partner institution ninety miles away. In Potentially it sits in the same catalogue as everything her own graduate school offers, and she books it the same way. No second login, no separate register, no email to a coordinator.
The session is part of a four-week series, so she books the series rather than four separate workshops, and her progress through it is tracked as a whole. It lands in her calendar. A reminder arrives the day before.
February
Her development isn't only the graduate school's.
She presents at a conference, runs a schools outreach session, and teaches her seminar groups all term. None of it was organised by the doctoral college, and all of it is development.
She adds each one to her record with the evidence attached, and each maps to the same RDF domains as everything she booked. Her development picture is the whole of what she does.
May
Her supervisor sees it and signs it.
Ahead of her annual review her supervisor looks at the record — what she's done, what it maps to, what she's written about it. Under permissions the institution sets, he comments and endorses against it.
Her industry mentor, who has no institutional login and works for a company in another city, does the same from outside.
Afterwards
She leaves, and takes it with her.
Most doctoral researchers move on from academia, and the case they have to make is to someone who has never done a PhD. Sofia's record is the source for it: teaching, supervision, public engagement, conference contributions, external courses, all with evidence attached.
Connect a personal email and the record stays with her after the doctorate ends.
Cohort engagement
All doctoral researchers · 2025/26
Engagement by RDF domain % of cohort
Institution's ownDTP shared
- Graduate School32
- Five faculties21
- Library11
- Research office9
- Three DTP partners Shared24
- Self-paced courses17
Meet Ruth.
She runs researcher development for a doctoral college, with provision coming from her own team, five faculties, the library, the research office and three partner institutions.
The catalogue
Everyone publishes into the same place.
Each provider adds its own provision and keeps control of it. Partner institutions in the training partnership do the same, and their researchers book across the whole of it. Ruth has a complete picture of what her researchers can actually access, which is something she has never had before.
She builds her own courses too — content, video, quizzes, reflection, and SCORM packages the institution already owns. What she builds goes into a content bank and comes back next year as part of something else.
The framework
Everything maps to the RDF.
Her doctoral college set the Vitae Researcher Development Framework up on the platform in about twenty minutes, and maps provision, activity and evidence to its domains and descriptors. Her DTP's own competency set runs alongside it, and so does any commitment the institution has made of its own - several frameworks at once, each researcher seeing what fits their situation.
The needs analysis
She plans from what they told her.
The training needs analysis runs at induction, before annual review, and at transfer. Results come back as structured data by cohort, department and funder, so she can see where the gaps are before she commissions anything.
Narrative analysis reads the free-text answers at volume, so what a whole cohort actually wrote arrives as themes rather than as a coding job for someone's summer.
Run again a year later, it shows movement.
The reporting
The numbers, for everyone who asks.
Development time is counted at researcher, cohort and institution level, so the participation picture is there when you need it rather than assembled afterwards.
Alongside it: engagement and completion by faculty, cohort, funder and provider. Which provision is used and which isn't. Feedback attached to the session that generated it, so programme review has evidence behind it.
Everything it does.
- One catalogue across graduate school, faculties, library, research office and partners
- Cross-institution and DTP attendees booking through the same system
- Recurring events and multi-session series held together as one thing
- Capacity limits and waiting lists that release automatically on cancellation
- Booking confirmations and reminders sent automatically
- Pre-event questionnaires
- Check-in capturing actual attendance, issuing the credential
- Post-event feedback attached to the session
- Outlook and Google Calendar sync
- Course builder with SCORM import and a reusable content bank
- Vitae Researcher Development Framework, configured in about twenty minutes
- Institutional and DTP competency sets
- Several frameworks running in parallel
- Self-assessment with immediate personalised feedback
- Recommendations drawn from your own catalogue
- 360 feedback from supervisors, mentors and peers
- Repeatable at induction, review and transfer, showing movement
- Narrative and text analysis of free-text responses
- External activity capture — conferences, teaching, public engagement, outside courses
- Certificate upload with the evidence attached to the entry
- Expiry dates and renewal prompts
- Hours counted against an annual expectation
- Transcripts for any date range
- Micro-credentials and digital badges issued on completion
- Evidence portfolio submission and managed review
- Supervisor and mentor endorsement, internal and external, under permissions
- Personal record portable after the doctorate ends
- Development time counted by researcher, cohort and institution
- Engagement and completion by faculty, cohort, funder and provider
- Which provision is used and which isn't
- Feedback attached to the session that generated it
- Export for your own analytics
- Student record and HR system data on a regular feed
- Single sign-on
- Optional LTI 1.3 with Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle or D2L
- White-label branding
Provision and content in one system
Potentially holds the catalogue and the booking, and builds and hosts the learning itself — so the record and the thing being recorded live in the same place.
Supervisors and mentors take part
Inside the institution or outside it, they comment, endorse and approve against a researcher's record under permissions you set. Governance, not just visibility.
Free text becomes findings
Narrative and text analysis reads open responses at volume, so what researchers actually wrote informs what you commission.
Running at national scale.
Jisc runs its Building Digital Capability service on Potentially. Researchers work through a question set built for them, distinct from those for teaching staff, library professionals and students, and each receives a personalised report linked to a curated resource library. Subscribing organisations add their own resources and see anonymised dashboards of capability and confidence across their institution.
250+subscribing organisations
950+curated resources mapped to frameworks
4role profiles, including researchers
It connects to what you already run.
Records and identity
Single sign-on through your existing identity provider. Student record and HR system data comes in on a regular file feed, so cohorts, departments and supervisory relationships stay current without anyone maintaining a list.
Learning and calendars
Optional LTI 1.3 connection to Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle or D2L. Potentially runs standalone, and embeds in your LMS if you have one. SCORM imports run natively. Bookings sync to Outlook and Google Calendar.
Setting up takes an hour or two of your IT team's time to connect, and most organisations are running a pilot within four to six weeks.
- EU data hosting
- WCAG 2.2 AA (self-assessed)
- Vitae RDF
- LTI 1.3
- Open Badges
- White-label branding
See it for yourself.
Thirty minutes. We'll show you Potentially set up for your provision — the catalogue, event management, needs analysis against the RDF, and the reporting that comes out of it.