Skills You Need to Become a Researcher

Dare to fail
Research is about finding new insights. You cannot do that without taking risks. You need to dare to fail. Most senior researchers would be able to write a book about failing. Document your failures. What did you try, and why, and what went wrong? Next time, you will avoid that path.

Handling Data
Depending on your field the sorts of results you get from your project will vary widely. It could be results from experiments within a laboratory, statistical evidence gathered from work in the field or qualitative material gleaned from interviews or from research in an archive or library. Whatever sort of results you get, you need to be able to handle large amounts of data efficiently and effectively.

Spend more time on the questions than on the answers
This is a common mistake among junior researchers: To quickly pick a problem, and then spend all too much time finding answers to that very problem, not seeing how full the world is of other more pertinent problems.

Team leading/managing
Being good at working with others is a difficult skill to achieve especially in the academic world when we are used to working with a large degree of autonomy. However a research project often requires the assistance of others: colleagues at your institution and elsewhere, administrative staff and possibly people in the private sector as well.