Connecting research data and software communities

This event was co-organised by STEP-UP, the University of Cambridge Research Data Team and Reproducible Research Cambridge on 10 February 2026 during Love Data Week. It brought together 38 participants from across the UK and Europe to examine how research data and software practices intersect across UK digital research. The programme combined two keynote talks, two lightning talk sessions, and a structured World Café discussion. This blog post summarises the experiences people shared and the themes that emerged.

Keynotes: two very different dRTP worlds

Our two keynote speakers provided a glimpse into two very different dRTP worlds:

Martin O’Reilly, Director of Research Engineering, Alan Turing Institute, reviewed the historical development of Research Software Engineering (RSE) and their communities. He talked about ongoing technical and professional challenges in RSE roles nationally and internationally. Martin gave an overview of the different types of roles at the Turing Institute and their career development pathways. He used polls in his talk to ask the attendees about their roles and challenges.

Gita Moghaddam, Principal Investigator, Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Cambridge, discussed her work involving automated decision-making processes based on data. She identified divergent interpretations of a decision-ready system, which included not only the scientific robustness of the model, but also transparent decision processes, data stability and representativeness, real world operational reliability, and overall data quality. She highlighted the need for predefined actions when failures occur and emphasised treating data and software as a unified system.

Lighting talks

We heard from 10 speakers representing 9 organisations who spoke about projects they’re doing to improve research software and data workflows, including:

• Building tools to verify published code, create reproducible code environments and manage data.
• Exploring requirements for federated research data movement between organisations.
• Contributing to platforms of curated computational models.
• Building in-house computational infrastructure and workflows.
• Developing common ground, community and belonging in dRTP teams.
• Developing a certification scheme for green computing.

A number of common themes emerged in discussions, including:

• A lot of this work is attempting to solve long-term problems without long term funding.
• There need to be mechanisms to recognise the work that goes into these projects (including behind the scenes).
• There is huge variability in institutional tech stacks, priorities and policies.

World Café

We held a World Café session to draw out common challenges and support across a range of themes. The session included 7 themed tables and 10-minute discussion blocks giving participants an opportunity to engage with several of the topics. Here is a summary of some of the discussion points at each table:

Training

• Required skills: co-leadership, database querying, data management and metadata, documentation, version control, testing, AI/ML, Trusted Research Environments, project management.
• Missing elements: training embedded within research teams, mentoring.
• Enablers: management support, protected time, recognition frameworks.

Careers

• Blockers: undervalued technical roles, unclear/non-existent progression pathways, misalignment with industry standards, leadership disengagement, need for constant self-advocacy.
• Needed support: structured career routes, community support mechanisms, dedicated skill development time.

Infrastructure

• Critical components: cloud compute, HPC, data centres, TREs, repositories, collaboration platforms.
• Issues: data sovereignty questions, fragmentation, slow storage systems, understaffing, legal complexity, lack of standards.
• Support gaps: legal guidance, documentation, governance clarity, structured knowledge transfer.

AI

• Observed changes: automation of routine tasks, improvements in search and metadata workflows, emerging agent-based methods.
• Risks: loss of skills, opacity, reproducibility challenges, security concerns, bias, unclear accountability.
• Requirements: governance frameworks, secure deployment policies, theoretical understanding, higher quality metadata.

Sustainability

• Actions discussed: assessing compute carbon cost, clarifying preservation policies, recognising that not all research outputs require long term retention.
• Risks: persistent “zombie” results, incomplete metadata.
• Needs: sustainability certification, consistent policies for data/software retirement.

Publishing outputs

• Challenges: licensing confusion, TRE restrictions, fear of exposing errors, lack of standardised processes, poor incentives.
• Support: training in software/data publication, clearer institutional policies on licensing and rights retention.

Commercialisation

• Opportunities: reusable software, data products, service-based models, PhD students’ work supports PIs in exploring commercial value of research.
• Barriers: balancing open source norms with commercial needs, navigating data restrictions, unclear business structures.
• Support needed: business training, funding for professional developers, stronger industry engagement.

Conclusions

Several overarching patterns emerged from the day:

• Data management, software development, and decision systems are typically separate teams in research organisations, but they need to be much more closely linked.
• There is a lot of fragmentation and inconsistency in infrastructure, governance, and career structures.
• Although AI/ML, data stewardship, and software engineering practices require continuous learning, organisational structures and workload often limit protected time to develop skills.
• Peer networks, grassroots initiatives and open-source software are core shared practices in dRTP spaces but these community contributions are rarely recognised formally in research organisations, leading to demotivation.

Feedback received from attendees of the event was positive and highlights the benefit of bringing research data and software communities together to network, share knowledge, tools and challenges. We hope to have follow up events to work on some of the challenges highlighted during the session. Thank you to all our speakers, attendees and to Cambridge University Press & Assessment for hosting our event.

Get involved

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Building a comprehensive and coordinated training landscape for dRTPs

On 27 November 2025, STEP-UP convened 35 experts from research organisations, training providers, and funders to tackle a difficult challenge: how do we build a coordinated, sustainable training ecosystem for digital Research Technical Professionals (dRTPs)?

This matters because research software engineers, research data professionals and computing infrastructure professionals are at the heart of delivering cutting-edge, reproducible, and efficient research. An ideal training landscape for these specialists will need to be comprehensive, FAIR and sustainable, which will require coordination between a large number of organisations.

The current training landscape is fragmented but rich

A quick poll of participants revealed the sheer scale of existing resources:

• At least 23 competency frameworks spanning profession-specific, discipline-specific, and industry-focused models.
• At least 33 training providers and platforms, including national centres, international infrastructures, community programmes, commercial platforms, and universities.

This diversity is a strength and also a challenge: how do we coordinate so that there is minimal duplication of effort, and also coordinate to ensure training covers all the relevant (and emerging) skills?

Key challenges

Participants highlighted several systemic issues:

• Discoverability: Training is scattered across multiple providers, making it hard to find and compare. A single catalogue or reference point could transform accessibility.
• Uncoordinated investments: Funders such as UKRI, the EU, and the NHS operate independently, leading to duplication and gaps. Greater coordination or co-funding would improve efficiency.
• Maintenance gaps: Community-generated training often lacks sustainable funding for updates. Updating is harder than creating, yet rarely rewarded. Communities of practice help but require financial support and recognition.
• Institutional variability: Demand and access differ across institutions due to differences in technology stacks, risk appetites, and job families. Access differs for centrally funded versus grant-funded staff. Cultural barriers exist for those outside traditional postdoc routes/roles.
• Format limitations: Some skills (such as leadership, adaptability, and research context awareness) require mentoring and experience, not just courses. Diverse learning styles demand multiple formats.

A community vision for training

The group identified a series of characteristics for an ideal training landscape, aligned with FAIR principles:

• Findable: A community-maintained catalogue with machine-readable metadata, searchable by skill and outcome.
• Accessible: Parity of access across contract types, multiple formats for diverse learning styles, and attention to inclusivity.
• Interoperable: Alignment between competency frameworks, industry standards, and metadata systems; platforms to signpost and share training.
• Reusable: Collaborative maintenance models and funding for updates.

Other ideas included: embedded trainers within dRTP teamsz, and recognition for those maintaining shared resources.

Next steps: turning vision into action

Immediate actions agreed upon:

• Follow-up Meeting: We will work towards a workshop within 6–12 months to co-design a five-year roadmap.
• Pilot Catalogue: We will pilot a “single point of truth” database of training content, providers, and frameworks searchable by profession, skill, and competency alignment.

This initiativeby STEP-UP complements ongoing work by UKRI-funded DRI projects, including CHARTED, SCALE-UP, and DisCouRSE NetworkPlus. Together, we aim to create a training ecosystem that empowers dRTPs and strengthens the UK’s research infrastructure.

Get involved

Find out about follow up work by joining our mailing list and following us on LinkedIn or Bluesky. And feel free to get in touch if you have questions, suggestions or ideas.

What is a research software analyst?

Defining the role

The RSA role is derived from business analysis good practices anchored in SFIA. It maps onto a range of roles in the Agile software development life cycle (SDLC), including research analyst, project coordinator, tester, team leader and research developer.

What does the RSA do at King’s?

During the feasibility assessment phase of a new project, the RSA elicits technical requirements. This is a collaborative process to:

• understand research objectives in a technology-agnostic manner.
• iterate, asking many questions, examining data samples as needed.
• evaluate options and approaches, integrating input from the rest of the RSE team.
• formalise prioritisation of requirements, in collaboration with the RSE team and project team.
• plan not only the project, but also for long term software and systems maintenance after the project ends.

During the active design and development phase, the RSA:

• Leads the project initiation process.
• Owns subsequent project reviews and analysis work.
• Manages communication and formal agreements between the project and RSE teams.
• Monitors prioritisation, capacity planning and substantial project changes.
• Contributes to data deposition and dissemination of project outputs.
• Contributes to the project review to improve subsequent performance.

Key skills for RSAs

In order to excel, the RSA relies on:

• knowledge of research domains, specific technical methods, organisational and sector context.
• experience (especially of collaboration).
• analytical skills, as applied to research questions and in framing technical requirements.
• influencing skills.

Key skills for an RSA are:

• Communication across skillsets and domains
• Analysis
• Consensus building
• Prioritisation and organising team capacity
• Awareness of funding context
• Network building and facilitation
• Diplomacy and negotiation
• Building KDL’s visibility via outreach and other engagement activities.

RSA roles at other institutions

While well-known and professionalised in industry (as business analysts or increasingly as product managers), Higher Education Institutions in the UK tend not to have RSA as a formal role. Instead the tasks above are carried out by RSEs themselves, by other technical roles (e.g. Scrum masters at the University of Manchester) or by data roles (e.g. data scientists at Alan Turing Institute; data stewards at UCL).

Professionalising a separate RSA role has the advantage of freeing RSEs (and other members of the Solution Development Team such as UI/UX designers) to focus on technical design and development. It also enables scaling of grant capture and parallel work on multiple projects in different stages of conceptualisation and development.

Separating overall group/lab management (the responsibility of the lab manager at KDL) from portfolio-level project management (the responsibility of the project manager at KDL) from project-level project management (the responsibility of the RSAs) enables accountability in financial management while keeping the deliverables close to the research questions and concerns (the main responsibility of the RSAs). This separation also allows for both lab level and project-level capacity planning.

Last but not least, it also allows the RSE team to evolve analysis processes around its SDLC (e.g. feasibility assessment, planning and documentation, decommissioning). It does however require some organisational investment beyond the better known RSE roles, including developing career pathways and provision for training and mobility across roles.

Find out more about about how this role works at King’s Digital Lab

Keep up to date with STEP-UP by joining our mailing list and following us on LinkedIn or Bluesky. And feel free to get in touch if you have questions, suggestions or ideas.

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.

Keep up to date by joining our mailing list and following us on LinkedIn or Bluesky. And feel free to get in touch if you have questions, suggestions or ideas.

Licensing, credit and quality for research software – technical notes

STEP-UP organised a community event on 4 September 2025, which was focused on practical guidance for research software engineers (RSEs) on licensing, publishing, and gaining recognition for research software, while navigating institutional policies and open science principles.

The event was organised by Isabella von Holstein (STEP-UP Community Manager) and delivered by Jeremy Cohen (STEP-UP PI) with a team from Imperial Library Scholarly Communications, consisting of Hamid Khan (Open Science), Yusuf Ozkan (Bibliometrics), Irene Barranco Garcia (Copyright) and Camille Regnault (Research Data). Many thanks to the team for their expertise!

This page summarises the presentations, integrated with insight from the RSEs present during discussion. This summary is written for dRTPs. In the session we also worked through a series of scenarios to explore realistic examples of research software licensing decisions - download these here.

Copyright and intellectual property (IP)

• Software and code are protected under UK copyright law (CDPA 1988), including source code, design materials and databases.
• Structured research data (e.g., spreadsheets, transcripts) may also be protected as literary works.
• Additional protections may apply: database rights, patents (in rare cases), and confidentiality/licensing agreements.
• Details of IP ownership vary by institution e.g. all students at Imperial own their IP (with exceptions), but only undergraduate and taught postgraduate students at King’s.
• Legal advice on software licensing is often expensive and not always accessible within institutions, as it has low priority compared to other institutional matters.
• Institutions may treat software as either a public good or a commercial asset, which require very different responses for licensing.

Licensing software and data

• Absence of a licence defaults to restrictive copyright with reuse prohibited.
• Licences define terms for access, modification, redistribution and attribution.
• Licensing supports FAIR principles: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable.
• Open source licences (e.g., MIT, Apache, GPL) are suitable for software; Creative Commons is not. Wikipedia comparison of licence types. Guidance on how to choose your licence.
• If software includes a GPL-licensed component, the entire software must comply with GPL.
• Changing licences between software iterations is legally murky as few cases have been tested in court.
• Standard copyright duration is long: 70 years after the author’s death or 50 years for machine-generated works. These are too long for software lifecycles.
• If a licence changes after you’ve downloaded software, your rights depend on the version you accessed.
• Use the first release year for software attribution; updated versions can carry later dates.

Publishing and citing software

• Software can be published via journals like JORS, JOSS, and SoftwareX.
• Zenodo (via GitHub) allows DOI minting and archiving for software releases.
• Visibility can be increased via hosting code on GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, or institutional directories.
• There’s no standard platform for tracking software impact. Metrics like GitHub stars, forks, and downloads are options but have flaws and can be easily gamed. “Used by” metrics on GitHub (i.e., other repos that depend on your code) are more reliable. Different communities do things differently. Different types of code attract different types of recognition.
• Web apps linked to code may have greater reach but lack clear metrics.
• The Open Access (OA) citation advantage (~50% more citations) may apply to software too.
• Attaching code to research outputs is essential but only a minority of researchers share code despite far more generating it.

Best practices for RSEs

• Document licensing choices clearly (e.g., include a LICENSE file with your code).
• Include metadata to support discoverability and citation (e.g. via a CITATION file).
• Use version control and release tagging for reproducibility.
• Keep dependencies up to date and check their licences.
• Software environments evolve so your software must adapt too.
• FAIR principles support transparency, equity, accessibility and reliability.
• Reusability can be enabled through the use of installers and packaging; containerisation (e.g., Docker, Podman) is one possible way to support the minimum viable principles of FAIRness.
• Compatibility instructions aren’t always required: just describe the environment used.
• Security risks are rising. Some repositories are being infiltrated by malicious packages.
• FAIR and reliability are distinct but complementary concepts; the FAIR for Research Software working group is exploring this further.

Institutional support and challenges

• Many researchers upload code to GitHub without a licence due to lack of awareness.
• RSEs often bridge gaps between academics and research services. Many academics have only partial expertise in metadata and data management, even in areas where data is used extensively. What is the role of the RSE here?
• Institutional Git platforms offer credibility and infrastructure, but portability concerns remain.
• Narrative CVs (e.g., UKRI applications) are helping broaden recognition of software outputs.
• Case studies are increasingly used as indicators of impact (e.g., for REF). What would you need to document in order for your code to be one?

Supporting dRTPs beyond events

In addition to delivering events, 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 are also developing and delivering training.

Keep up to date by joining our mailing list and following us on Linkedin or Bluesky. And feel free to get in touch if you have questions, suggestions or ideas.”

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.

Keep up to date by joining our mailing list and following us on Linkedin or Bluesky. And feel free to get in touch if you have questions, suggestions or ideas.”

The STEP-UP RSLondon Conference 2025

This blog post is an expanded version of the STEP-UP RSLondon 2025 event report included in the July 2025 edition of the Imperial College London Research Software Community newsletter.

The STEP-UP RSLondon Conference 2025 took place on Monday 7 July 2025. Building on our previous five editions of the conference from 2019 onwards that were run under the RSLondonSouthEast name, this year’s event continued work started last year to develop our community from being largely research software focused to also representing people working in research data and research computing infrastructure-related roles. Updating the name of this year’s event enabled us to recognise the fantastic opportunity that the STEP-UP project is offering us in developing support for a wider group of “digital Research Technical Professionals (dRTPs)”, and in making it possible for us to run the event itself.

Get the event slides and abstracts here

To provide more space for abstract submissions from members of the wider dRTP community, this year’s event was the first to include three parallel tracks for part of the day. One track was run for each of research software, data and computing infrastructure/High Performance Computing (HPC)-focused talks. We also had a number of more general talks covering dRTP community-related topics which were scheduled in our morning plenary session.

This year’s conference was our biggest yet, with over 140 people attending on the day. Following a welcome and introduction from the conference co-chairs, Ilektra Christidi and Jeremy Cohen, we were delighted to welcome Professor Andrea Townsend-Nicholson from UCL who delivered our morning keynote talk on “Bringing the Virtual Human to Life”. Our morning and afternoon sessions included an excellent mix of community-related and technically-focused talks and we really hope that everyone who attended found something of interest in each of the sessions.

Beyond the talks themselves, a personal highlight of the event was the huge buzz of people chatting over refreshments at each of the coffee breaks and during lunch, taking the opportunity to meet collaborators, colleagues and contacts both existing and new.

Bringing the event to a conclusion, our closing keynote speaker, Dr Malvika Sharan of the Alan Turing Institute, delivered a talk on “Shaping Research Culture Through Communities: Lessons from Open Science”. You can find links to Malvika’s slides, and the slides from many of the other talks delivered at the event, on our conference schedule page.

The conference organisers would like to thank UKRI-EPSRC for supporting the event through the STEP-UP project (EP/Y530608/1), and UCL for sponsoring our closing reception which provided a nice opportunity for attendees to conclude discussions from earlier in the day, and to chat with speakers from the day’s talks.

Feedback from attendees was extremely positive and in addition to many people saying how much they enjoyed the event, comments included that the event helped to make attendees “Feel seen and understood…”, and that the conference helped to provide context to the work that dRTPs do. It was also highlighted that the conference helped to identify “…where others are at with similar problems.”. We also received a range of constructive feedback that will help us to further enhance future editions of the conference. This included one comment relating to the perspective that the event treated software, data and research computing infrastructure groups as quite separate entities and that “…it would be good to also explore synergies [between these groups]” and look at how the overlaps between them are managed in organisations where roles already exist. Other feedback indicated interest in more interactive sessions like panel discussions.

The STEP-UP RSLondon conference will be back in 2026. Look out for confirmation of the date for the 2026 event over the coming weeks.

If any of the ideas and initiatives highlighted in this article sound like things you’d like to get involved with, or if you’re already doing relevant or related work and would like to engage with the STEP-UP platform, please do get in touch.

You can read it here.

If any of the ideas and initiatives highlighted in this article sound like things you’d like to get involved with, or if you’re already doing relevant or related work and would like to engage with the STEP-UP platform, please do get in touch.

This blog post was originally published on the SES blog in September 2024, and is reposted with permission.

The role that technical professionals play in supporting the research community is vital, but not always recognised, as previously highlighted in an SES blog post.

In the two years since that was written, the concept of the Research Technical (or Research Technology) Professional (RTP) has continued to develop. There is growing recognition of the breadth of supporting technical skills that underpin modern research giving greater clarity to the scope of RTPs’ skills. It is now widely recognised that the RTP space covers everything from the design, management and operation of specialist research facilities, through to digital skills in the areas of software, data and computing infrastructure.

In order to better represent different subsets of the RTP space, the concept of the “digital Research Technical Professional” (dRTP) has emerged. dRTPs focus on the design, development and maintenance of software, the management and analysis of data and the design, deployment and operation of research computing infrastructure. As with all RTP roles, dRTP roles also frequently involve actively contributing to research and the development of research outputs and results.

So, we have a name – the digital Research Technical Professional – but does that give us a career, recognition, job opportunities, a future? Not quite yet! However, as the demand for specialist digital research skills grows, so does the need for better structures, training, career options and, ultimately, recognition for research professionals specialising in technical work. We’re starting to see things shift and we’re also seeing funders helping to underpin these changes through initiatives such as EPSRC’s 2023 Strategic Technical Platforms call. This resulted in the funding of 11 projects, covering both general and digitally-focused RTP support.

One of the projects funded under this call is STEP-UP – “a Strategic TEchnical Platform for University technical Professionals”, which received £2m of funding. STEP-UP is a regional platform bringing together three SES members, Imperial College London, UCL and King’s College London, with the University of Westminster, to develop a range of support for dRTPs.

STEP-UP is based around the idea that we are trying to solve a number of challenging issues in developing improved support for dRTPs, and tackling these issues at a regional level, between a group of geographically local institutions offers a number of benefits and opportunities. As we develop approaches, processes and outputs from the project work, STEP-UP will then look to take these to the wider national, and potentially international, communities, offering benefits far beyond the core platform.

But what can we actually do to grow support for dRTPs, develop a realistic career path and give people in these roles the recognition they deserve? While this is likely to be a lengthy process that can’t be solved by a single project, STEP-UP is pioneering a range of activities that we believe will make a real difference to developing the digital RTP community:

Building communities: We’ve seen the importance of the UK Research Software Engineering community in advocating for the development of the RSE role over the past decade. We’ve also seen the value of regional communities, such as Research Software London, and local communities at individual research institutions, in helping to develop awareness of the RSE role and support the development of new RSE teams. Building on this recognition of the value and importance of communities, STEP-UP is working to develop new Communities of Practice focused on growing a diverse, inclusive and accessible environment for dRTP careers across the areas of software, data and computing infrastructure.

Secondments and mentoring: University role structures have been developed over many decades to support a longstanding and widely accepted model. While we advocate for, and actively work with partners to support change, there are other things that we can do to enhance career opportunities. One is the development of a secondment scheme enabling technical professionals to move both within and between institutions for short periods to gain new skills as well as providing options to bridge between different funding streams, ultimately enhancing job security. Alongside this, a mentoring scheme will help to give technical professionals access to new skills and greater understanding of the RTP domain while building links with people at a range of levels in different institutions.

Training and skills: Training and access to skills is the key to developing both the existing and next generation of technical professionals, and addressing the current significant skills shortage in this area. Understanding what to learn when and how to go about it is difficult. STEP-UP is working to develop a training infrastructure underpinned by pathways that will provide a more structured route to skills development. This is being undertaken alongside the continuation of a variety of community training activities developed through RSLondon and by project team members.

Awareness and recognition: Behind all of these aspects of enhancing support for dRTPs is the need to increase awareness and recognition of the roles they undertake, the contribution they make and the value they add to research. Indeed, much modern research wouldn’t be practical without dRTP skills, whether delivered by researchers themselves, or by dedicated technical professionals. We know that advocacy and engagement work in helping to raise awareness of the need for dRTPs with institutional leadership and other key stakeholders, so why not join us in working together to diversify the research environment, provide better recognition for everyone involved in contributing to the UK’s world class research outputs and helping to make a difference?

“Much modern research wouldn’t be practical without dRTP skills, whether delivered by researchers themselves, or by dedicated technical professionals” -Jeremy Cohen, PI of STEP-UP

If any of the ideas and initiatives highlighted in this article sound like things you’d like to get involved with, or if you’re already doing relevant or related work and would like to engage with the STEP-UP platform, please do get in touch.