Recruiting digital research technical professionals: do job descriptions reflect the work they do?

The STEP-UP team wanted to know whether digital Research Technical Professional (dRTP) job descriptions reflect emerging patterns of competencies across the sector. If so we might be able to use them to identify dRTP training needs.

Recruiting digital Research Technical Professionals: do job descriptions reflect the work they do?

Victoria Yorke-Edwards, UCL Advanced Research Computing Centre

University research is changing at a rapid pace with increasing demands for the ability to process large datasets, for computational modelling, and for more advanced computing facilities. Alongside this come calls to share outputs, including data, more openly. This ‘digital infrastructure’ is the foundation of an increasing number of research areas, but without trained, motivated and expert technical talent, and the career opportunities to support them, these new and increasing demands won’t be met, and research and its benefits will be held back.

I and my colleagues James Wilson, Katie Buntic and Sam Ahern from the UCL Advanced Research Computing Centre are leading the training work-package of STEP-UP. As part of this, we will be delivering training and developing new training courses. However, before we develop new courses, we have to work out which topics are needed by the community. We thought one way to do this would be to review current dRTP job descriptions.

We reviewed dozens of job descriptions from across our partner institutes and across the UK (with the odd foray into Europe), focussing primarily on central, institutional roles, rather than at the departmental or project level. We wanted to know what recruiters were looking for, and whether there were any emerging patterns of competencies across the sector. Where such patterns exist, we could then look to focus our training in those areas.

dRTP job descriptions

What we found was that:

• Most job descriptions are fairly generic, not focussing on very specific technical skills that might indicate specific requirements.

• Lots of soft skills were listed, including problem solving, good communication, both written and verbal, the ability to work with stakeholders and team working.

• Most employers wanted dRTPs to have at least one programming language, but organisations were generally agnostic about which. This included for Data Stewards, although there was some variation here depending on whether the Data Steward was based in a library-based team (where it might not be expected), or a more computing-based department (where it might), and in the level of skill and experience expected in that language (generally lower than amongst the other dRTPs).

• Higher grades/ bands tended to ask for the same broad skills with the addition of leadership, managerial and budgetary experience, and the ability to take responsibility for activities.

• It is common to see organisations asking that applicants have at least one of a long list of specialist knowledge/ skills and experience, but not specifying which (although accompanying advertisements might make clear a subset of these is required for a specific job role). For example:

  • “Extensive experience or taught specialism in one or more areas of software engineering. Including but not limited to: cloud computing, visualisation, web applications, data analytics, artificial intelligence.”

  • “Experience with one or more specialist technologies for the management, discovery, organisation or dissemination of research data, such as techniques in bioinformatics, electronic health records, longitudinal/ cohort studies, metadata management, sensitive data, information governance, semantic methods and ontologies, or data associated with a particular research field.”

• Job applications predominantly fell into one of two camps, perhaps reflecting two differing views on qualifications: roles where PhDs were expected (or equivalent experience) and roles where an undergraduate degree, at most, was necessary.

• Experience in research environments is a recurring and major theme; in some cases it may be that a requirement for a PhD is really just a requirement for an understanding of the research environment.

• There is barely any mention of open science or FAIR in the actual personal specification in UK adverts, although in Europe there is much more discussion of it in Data Stewardship adverts.

In short, the job descriptions were too generic to get much insight into training requirements, especially on technical topics.

Alternative ways to identify training needs

So, we gave up on this experiment as we increasingly felt that job descriptions weren’t giving us an insight into the competencies of dRTP roles but instead were reflecting internal university HR process requirements. It can take considerable time to approve job descriptions in universities, so we wondered whether hiring managers are incentivised to draw up a single job description to cover multiple roles, including for as yet unplanned recruitment. Where specific skills are required for a role, they may be predominantly being included in the job adverts themselves, something that we weren’t collecting and analysing.

Instead of using job descriptions to understand dRTP training requirements, we’ve moved on to working with the numerous competency frameworks emerging across the sector.

Please let us know whether our findings reflect your experience! Does your job description really reflect the work that you do? If you’ve ever been a hiring manager for a dRTP role, how did you decide what to put in the job description? Please send us your comments here.

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