Building computational capacity in data service professionals

Acquiring computational skills is becoming increasingly important for data services staff working across social sciences. This includes computing skills that they need to effectively deliver data services, and computational social science skills that are used for research. These skills are needed to keep pace with new forms of data, new methods, ever-greater computing power, the new opportunities for research that are changing at pace as the data environment evolves, and, accordingly, the evolving needs of those using these kinds of data. Data services, need to be appropriately equipped in order to serve the research community. However, there are many barriers to acquiring these skills across data services staff, especially as both recently qualified and established staff were likely to have been trained in traditional forms of data and statistics.

This presentation, with interaction, describes progress and preliminary results from on an UKRI-funded project led by a team at the University of Manchester who are affiliated with the UK Data Service. The project aims to build capacity within (a) UK Data Service data professionals and (b) the wider international data services community, via a variety of upskilling opportunities mechanisms. The vision is to enhance data services capacity globally, enhance the careers of data service professionals, and establish a Community of Practice to contribute to lifelong learning. This will be an interactive session, to hear more about the project and to obtain informal and anonymous participant feedback on the results of the project to date.