International Scholarships

The Resilient Organisations Research Programme is offering a Ph.D. scholarship to an outstanding student wanting to research strategies for evaluating and benchmarking the resilience of organisations.

Resilient Organisations is a 6 year research programme funded by the Foundation of Research Science and Technology in New Zealand. The programme runs through until June 2010, and involves researchers from the University of Canterbury, University of Auckland and Kestrel Group. The Resilient Organisations programme focuses on understanding how resilient New Zealand organisations are in the face of major crises. This resilience is a function of the situation awareness, keystone vulnerabilities and adaptive capacity and of the organisation.

Within the research programme we have already had a PhD student working to define organisational resilience and to develop and test a 5-step process for improving organisational resilience. The research has a very practical and ‘real world’ focus, with the student working closely with ten case study organisations to identify and diagnose core resilience issues for these organisations. We now want to take this research to the next stage, to develop ways of quantifying and benchmarking resilience across different organisations and sectors. The student awarded this scholarship will be working with a team of researchers, including six other postgraduate students working on related projects.

Selection criteria
The ideal candidate will have very strong interpersonal and communication skills, and have an appreciation of business realities. Previous experience in any of the areas of risk management, business continuity planning, emergency management, strategic planning, or benchmarking initiatives would be helpful.

Application process
Please send a CV plus a one page description of your understanding of organisational resilience and what skills you would bring to this project. Please send all applications (CV plus one page description) to Erica Seville (erica.seville@canterbury.ac.nz).

Further Information
We are happy to discuss this research in more detail with potential candidates. First please take a look at the information provided on our research website: www.resorgs.org.nz. If you have any further questions please email Erica Seville (erica.seville@canterbury.ac.nz) to arrange a time to talk by telephone.

Closing date: 31 January 2007
Value: NZ$20,000 per annum over three years

Tags: benchmarking-initiatives, emergency-management, organisational-resilience, strategic-planning, phd in organisations