As part of the work within STEP-UP to develop technical communities and career opportunities, we recognise the importance of providing ways to develop technical skills.

To inform the development of our training programme we undertook a review of the Training Landscape: Mapping Training Resources to Digital Research Technical Professional Competency Framework.

This dataset was developed to provide a training catalogue that highlights a variety of training courses and other training materials aimed at “digital Research Technical Professionals” (dRTPs). dRTPs are technical professionals working within the research community with research software, research data or research computing infrastructure. The training materials are linked to skills from a range of competency frameworks focused on digital skills.

There are now many open technical training materials available but these materials can be difficult to discover and technical professionals are often unsure what materials to look for and where to look for them. On this basis, STEP-UP has set out to discover as many relevant training materials as possible, both through existing links and through inviting contributions to the dataset from the dRTP community at various events and workshops. This work has been led by the STEP-UP WP2 team based in the Research Data Stewardship group within Advanced Research Computing at UCL, in collaboration with colleagues from across the STEP-UP project.

The training courses represented in this dataset have then been mapped to skills described in a number of competency frameworks as part of undertaking a gap analysis to understand where training for key skills is currently missing.

If there is training missing from our mapping, or you are keen to work with us to provide training to members of your team or community feel free to get in touch with us to discuss opportunities.

Training to address the identified gaps is being developed and will be listed on our events page including:

  • Basic research computing training through Software Carpentry workshops covering use of the bash shell, version control with Git, and an introduction to programming in Python or R.
  • Working with containers - an introduction to Podman/Docker and Singularity
  • Research data stewardship and data management training
  • Introductory High Performance Computing (HPC) training