Assignments

“Everyone needs a coach. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast, or a bridge player.” – Bill Gates

Starting from April 2025, I am accepting requests for consulting assignments (research, market analysis, evaluations), public speaking, academic mentoring and professional coaching. Coaching is crucial for development of both earlier career researchers/professionals and more senior professionals. See a useful TED talk on how coaching helps even seasoned specialists, such as established surgeons. And of course a short clip from Gates’s TED talk.

At the same time, being a “critical friend” (a coach/mentor) is very important to researchers, academics (on tenure-track and post-docs) as well as professionals who are looking for a partner to advise, listen and critique a project, a plan or a trajectory. I have benefitted myself enormously from such mentors, coaches and “critical friends” (paid and unpaid) at critical times of my life, and would be happy to engage with you in shaping your project and helping you achieve your goals. My areas of expertise cover the following topics:

Academic consulting

-writing a successful Ph.D. proposal in the “Western” academia, successful strategies of getting into a PhD programme with a promise of an academic career

-academic job search and applications, tenure-track applications, promotion trajectory to Associate Professor

-academic writing & journal publishing strategies and guidance per paper (social sciences and humanities, but also exact sciences)

-academic grant applications (PhD and postdoc fellowships, larger consortium building strategies)

Policy consulting

-water diplomacy and security globally and in the region of the larger Mediterranean (Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia)

-water governance & policy reforms (e.g. public-private partnerships, pricing reform, financing, public participation, inclusive social development)

-linking commercial diplomacy (trade missions) with knowledge diplomacy (longer-term knowledge partnership between countries and other parties) in the water and climate change adaptation sectors

-capacity building of universities in the region of the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Fees

For academic consulting, I charge per hour regardless the nature of the consultation. An intake session is at a reduced fee in order to determine a match. For policy and organisational consulting, I charge per days only. There might be exceptions for VAT/BTW, this is to be determined during contracting. Please, get in touch to get a price quote: fmukhtarov[at]gmail.com

 

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