What we're doing in STEP-UP
STEP-UP is undertaking a range of work across a group of work packages. More information will be available here soon but the core project activities include the following:
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Technical Community Development: The Research Software London (RSLondon) regional research software community was started in 2018 to enhance the support available for Research Software Engineers and for researchers undertaking significant software development work. RSLondon has developed into a community that advocates for improved career opportunities, offers core research computing training and runs events and activities, in particular our annual RSLondonSouthEast research software workshop.
Within STEP-UP, our focus is on a wider set of technical communities under the umbrella of digital Research Technical Professionals (dRTPs). We will build on the expertise gained through developing and running RSLondon to grow additional regional Communities of Practice to support data and research computing infrastructure professionals, as well as continuing to develop our software-focused community.
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Research Technical Champions: Our Research Technical Champions programme builds on the Research Software Champions programme piloted at Imperial in 2023 and 2024, expanding this scheme to cover data and computing infrastructure. In our current model, Champions are PhD students who are paid for their work raising awareness of software, data and High Performance Computing best practices within their department. They work with departmental colleagues to understand technical challenges they face as part of their research and to help address these through running workshops, drop-in sessions or other activities, as well as providing links to other groups around the institution who can offer technical guidance and advice.
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Training and Skills: Providing high-quality, well-structured training opportunities is vital in helping to provide dRTPs with the skills they need to support the ever-growing technical requrements of the research community. STEP-UP is undertaking an analysis of training needs and requirements to develop learning pathways and training structures that can support the next generation of dRTPs. Alongside this work, we will continue to offer a range of general training courses and opportunities to the community.
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Secondments: Many technical professionals in the research community work alone, or within small groups as part of a research group or centre. This makes learning new skills and gaining exposure to different technical platforms, infrastructure and tools more difficult. While much larger groups of technical professionals increasingly exist, often at a central IT or similar level within an institution, gaining leadership skills and opportunities to work with specialist infrastructure can still be a challenge. Secondments provide an excellent opportunity to allow people to move between groups or teams within an institution or between institutions for a short period of, say, 3 or 6 months to develop and share skills and expertise.
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Mentoring: Another route that we’ll be helping to develop new skills is through the development of a mentoring programme within one of our project partners. We’ll then be looking to trial this scheme with other partners and more widely with groups and communities elsewhere in the UK.
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Events and activities: STEP-UP will be running a variety of events such as seminars, panel sessions, networking opportunities and more over the coming years. We’ll also be continuing our annual RSLondonSouthEast workshop but growing this to support our new communities of practice around data and computing infrastructure.
We’re in the process of getting things going so look out for more details on this website in the coming months, including information on events and opportunities.