What are the training pathways into being a dRTP?
A core aspect of STEP-UP is providing our community with the support to develop the skills that they need. These should create additional routes for individuals to widen their skills, especially at more advanced levels.
What are the training pathways into being a dRTP?
Jeremy Cohen and Isabella von Holstein, Imperial College London
At present, the core routes into digital Research Technical Professional (dRTP) roles are via Masters’s programmes, PhDs and postdocs. Postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers who have taken a particular interest in the technical aspects of their course or research work may choose to go into a dRTP role rather than staying in a purely research-focused role. However, this approach is not sustainable if we’re to meet the demand for dRTPs over the coming years. For research software engineers, this step is also a diversity bottleneck and we expect the same is true for data and computing infrastructure specialists. We need to engage a much wider group of potential dRTPs, to bring in new perspectives, lived experiences and skills, in order to ensure that we can develop a new generation of dRTPs to support digital research for many years to come.
A core aspect of STEP-UP is providing our community with the support to develop the skills that they need. These should create additional routes for individuals to widen their skills, especially at more advanced levels.
Trialling the “training grid”
To initiate this work, we’re mapping existing open source training materials that our team, and the wider community, are aware of, onto a 3 x 3 grid, and cross referencing these with existing competency frameworks. This grid structure will present skills across research software, research data and research computing infrastructure (the columns) at beginner, intermediate and advanced levels (the rows). We are building on the outputs of other projects such as UNIVERSE-HPC, which has done extensive work to understand learning pathways in the High Performance Computing field. We’re also taking advantage of widely used open training materials from groups including The Carpentries and CodeRefinery.
Following our initial development of the grid, we’ll have our first opportunity to get community feedback on the grid at RSECon25, at the University of Warwick, in session OC0.02 on 10 September 2025. Realistically, we know that running a comprehensive training programme across all dRTP skills at all levels of experience is not feasible! But the training grid provides a structured view of this space, and allows us to ask apparently obvious questions like “how do we define an advanced skill?” and “what if a skill is basic for one part of the dRTP community but advanced for another?” and especially “where are the gaps in training provision?”.
This is all preliminary work to identify and then deliver the skills that we see most demand for within our community. Where relevant courses already exist, we’ll provide access, and where there are gaps in the training provision, we’ll develop and deliver new courses. However, as our work progresses towards skill delivery and training material development, we hope that the training grid can be maintained as a valuable and sustainable community resource.
Supporting dRTPs beyond training
In addition to developing and delivering training, STEP-UP has a number of other activities to grow support for current and future dRTPs, as well as growing the awareness and recognition of the vital work that dRTPs do within the research community.
We are advocating for the development of enhanced career pathways and structures, since these will help organisations to recruit and retain dRTPs.We are working with sector stakeholders and partners to understand career challenges and how dRTP roles can be better reflected in institutional structures.
We’re also setting up secondment and mentoring schemes, as well as a Research Technical Champions scheme aimed at PhD students at STEP-UP’s four project team institutions. We also have our events, especially our annual conference.
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