Language centres in higher education are facing new challenges as they plan curricula for an increasingly diverse student body and undertake new tasks in support of the multiform internationalisation of universities. Continuing professional development clearly needs to be taken to a new level, and one way of doing this is to include research in a more systematic way. In this article, we focus on the role of research as an aspect of the development of a language centre and on human resources development in particular. Based on recent data from university language centres in Finland, we report language centre personnel's views on research in relation to their work. The results show that they are strongly in favour of developing their professional practice by engaging in research and that they feel that research conducted in language centres should be practical and have a direct relation to the other work of language centres. We also discuss different ways of supporting a research orientation and present practical models for implementing this in the development of work.