STEP-UP Training Landscape: Mapping Training Resources to Digital Research Technical Professional Competency Frameworks

This dataset has been developed by the UKRI EPSRC-funded STEP-UP project (https://step-up.ac.uk) 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.The content in this dataset is provided across 6 sheets. At the core of the data are the three sheets covering skills for the three main areas of dRTP expertise - software, infrastructure and data. The “Data_issues” sheet covers an initial analysis of the data competencies and a categorisation of these skills and where they fit. The "Competency Frameworks" sheet details the competency frameworks used and which domains they map to. The “Training platforms” sheet contains details of each of the training platforms/providers referred to in the software, infrastructure and data sheets. A definition of the fields used across these sheets is provided in the metadata sheet.