Understanding Community Perspectives on HPC Skills and Training Pathways

The “Understanding the Skills and Pathways Behind Research Software Training” BoF session run at ISC’23 provided an opportunity to bring together a group of attendees interested in approaches to enhance skills within the Research Software Engineering community. This included looking at options for understanding and developing pathways that practitioners can follow to develop their skills and competencies in a structured manner from beginner to advanced level. Questions discussed included: How can we high-light the existence of different training opportunities and ensure awareness and uptake? What materials already exist and what’s missing? How do we navigate this largely undefined landscape? In short: how does one train to become an RSE? One of the interactive parts of this session was based around a live, anonymous survey. Participants were asked a number of questions ranging from their role in the training community to how easy they feel it is to find/access training content targeting different skill levels. They were also asked about challenges faced in accessing relevant content, combining it into a coherent pathway, and linking training content from different sources. Other questions focused on discoverability of material and skills that are most commonly overlooked. The number of respondents and responses varied between questions, with 24 to 50 participants engaging and providing 32 to 59 replies. The goal of this lightning talk is to present findings, within the context of the community wide effort to make the training materials more FAIR - findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.