Ancillary activities

Ancillary activities are all professional activities carried out by an employee of Utrecht University which do not fall under their university position (regardless of the scope of their employment contract with Utrecht University and the scope of the ancillary activities).

Written permission

Employees must obtain prior written permission from their manager before carrying out any ancillary activities. Any changes to these activities must also be reported to the manager in writing. In this way the university can ensure that the employee's work is not adversely affected and that no unacceptable competition or conflict of interests can arise.

Unacceptable competition

Unacceptable competition arises when an employee performs ancillary activities at a rival institution and is, in the course of doing so, in a position to disclose confidential or original information to another competing employer.

Conflict of interests

An example of a conflict of interests is that of an employee working late into the night for another employer, so that the quality of their work for Utrecht University is adversely affected on the following day.

Discussion of activities in A&D interview

In the annual Assessment & Development Interview the employee discusses with their manager whether the ancillary activities still apply, and this is recorded in the report of the interview.

Disclosure of ancillary activities

It is a requirement of some job categories that the ancillary activities be disclosed via a statement on the profile page. This is the case for professors, for example. Additional agreements have been made with the Minister of Education about transparency regarding the ancillary activities of professors. These agreements require such activities to be declared on the individual profile page of the professor in question. Each professor is personally responsible for keeping the information on their profile page up to date.

Utrecht University takes the transparency of ancillary activities very seriously and has tightened its monitoring of this in recent years. The university checks the veracity of the information on the profile regularly.

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