Background to DisCouRSE

This page contains the vision for the Network that we submitted in our funding application.

Scaling and sustaining the impact of digital Research Technical Professional (dRTP) communities requires developing leaders who have an amplifying effect. They are then able to create environments in which to develop other RTPs and nurture RTP skills more broadly within the UK. Our Network leverages the existing Research Software Engineer (RSE) community within the UK, looking to enhance it and build connections with a rich tapestry of related dRTP communities, as we address gaps around cross-disciplinary leadership training and link this with work to build sustainable career pathways.

Network members and beneficiaries

Our Network builds from the foundation of UK RSEs in academia, other research organisations or institutes, civil service, the third sector, and industry, as well as “RSE-adjacent” dRTPs in these sectors – those professions that have some skills overlap with RSE.

Why begin with RSEs? The UK RSE community is vibrant with significant grass-roots activity and even coordinating structures via a national Society of RSE and the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI). It gives us a critical mass of people, structures (e.g. Society working groups), existing activities (e.g. an annual conference and workshops), and stakeholder engagement to make progress rapidly.

The RSE community has always been open and inclusive.¹ Rather than rigidly defining the role of an RSE, the community encourages individuals to identify with the skills and processes involved regardless of their job title. This approach invites participation from all whose work aligns with RSE principles. As a result, the UK RSE community has expanded to include data scientists, data stewards, data engineers, DevOps specialists, system administrators, bioinformaticians, and many other dRTPs. Two thirds of RSE groups surveyed in June 2024 included other dRTPs in their membership. These existing connections between RSEs and RSE-adjacent roles provide a strong foundation for further collaboration, and we will strengthen these connections to share learning and amplify our joint impact.

Doing so is possible because our themes cross-cut a wide range of dRTP professions and our planned activities will both provide direct benefit across the board, and be more effective because of this. For instance, leadership skills training would be applicable to anyone from a technical background. Career tracks and promotion processes are more likely to be implemented by employers if applicable to broad groups rather than restricted to RSEs (or even dRTPs as a whole).

The open nature of the RSE definition makes defining core RSE competencies challenging.² We will look at what skills are common across RSE-adjacent professions, and what skills are distinct. However our skills training focus is on leadership skills, including advanced skills for technical leadership, which are applicable across dRTP professions. This will facilitate mobility of staff, flexible career pathways, and cross-fertilisation across dRTP profiles.

This proposal itself has been developed in the open, with the community informed of our vision via the UK RSE Slack channel and at RSECon2024, and invited to suggest ideas. We also presented our plans at the RSE Leaders meeting on 2nd September and incorporated feedback received. The broad support for our proposal is evidenced by 21 letters of support from a wide range of organisation types. This process of community engagement and collaboration will continue as the Network runs, expanding to related communities.

Note that we do not directly address researchers who might need or possess dRTP skills, except in so far as they join the community. However, our training of dRTPs will enhance their ability to support and train researchers, so they benefit indirectly. Training the trainers in this way will achieve much greater impact from a limited budget. Thereby the UK in general will acquire a greater data-intensive research capability.

The need for our Network

While the RSE movement has been extremely successful and well-supported within the UK, work to define competencies, design career structures, and develop new leaders is primarily driven by volunteer or local efforts, and so change is slow and piecemeal. Simultaneously it is widely recognised that there is massively growing demand for RSE skills across UK research & innovation and beyond, as the digital transformation of research fields continues.^{3 4 5 6} All RSE groups in the country are at or beyond capacity,⁷ embedded RSEs lack institutional support structures,⁸ and skills training for researchers is over-subscribed.⁹ These factors limit the community’s ability to scale, adopt good practices, maintain foundational tools, and influence policy. This not only hampers the expansion of skills but also constrains the delivery of essential data services and large-scale computing capabilities — both of which are critical to achieving a national digital research infrastructure (DRI) and to exploiting it fully.⁴ Moreover, the dependence on volunteer eforts exacerbates equality, diversity, and inclusion challenges, as underrepresented groups often lack the resources to engage in unpaid initiatives. Coordinating funding through this proposal to provide network management, communications, and events support alongside targeted funding for specific impactful activities will transform this situation and lead to a step change in the effectiveness of UK DRI investment. This proposal is thus a timely opportunity for strategic investment to move RSE community initiatives to a more sustainable footing, and expand their impact by involving related dRTP communities.

The availability of technical skills training is steadily increasing through recent UKRI funding rounds (e.g. Innovation Scholars, Strategic Technical Platform funding 2024, UNIVERSE-HPC) and the work of the SSI and others. Both non-technical and specialist advanced training opportunities are more limited, but are sought after by community members: the most common response regarding skills to improve in the 2022 RSE survey¹⁰ was “project management”, with other forms of management and leadership skills, including requirements gathering and winning research funding, being highly ranked. In our survey of 36 RSE group leaders in June 2024, only 13 considered their institution had leadership training suitable for the needs of dRTPs. Anecdotal comments from group members suggest that places are severely limited, that local courses are good for networking across their institution, but that the material is often at surface level and lacking case studies relevant to dRTP roles. At a 2019 Aspiring RSE Leaders workshop “every attendee wanted the workshop run as a regular event to help build the RSE community” but this has not happened (albeit the Digital Research Infrastructure Retreats cover some similar topics).

A lack of career progression options also means that beneficiaries of training either need to shift to managerial roles (of which there are few) or leave for industry. In the 2022 RSE survey¹⁰ only 25% of UK respondents thought it likely that they would be able to gain a promotion within their current group, and while 50% intended to stay in an RSE role, only 31% thought there were many opportunities available to do so. In our June survey of 36 RSE group leaders, only 22 had a clear career path for progression to senior levels. For over half of those, doing so required taking on management responsibilities, highlighting a lack of technical leadership roles. A similar number had no defined promotion process – even though senior roles existed within the group, moving to a more senior role required applying for a new job. The situation at the wider institutional level is worse, with only 10 leaders indicating that dRTPs outside their group had a clear career path.

The need for RSE career pathways has been a discussion topic since the term was first coined.¹ The Technician Commitment and the Researcher Development Concordat seek to enhance institutional commitments to recognition and career development for staff including RTPs. However, the blended research/service role of many dRTPs means they can end up not fully supported by either, with inappropriate metrics applied for individual staff circumstances. The prevalence of short fixed-term contracts for both postdoctoral researchers and RSEs within academia¹⁰ leads to rapid staff turnover and skill “loss” as experienced individuals move to industry for senior positions.^{5 11} Policy changes are therefore still needed at an institutional level to increase recognition for dRTPs, as also highlighted by ¹⁰: recognition by those RSEs support directly (81%) is significantly greater than recognition by their institution (46%).

These factors influenced our decision to focus on leadership training and corresponding career pathways. Leadership can take many forms, beyond traditional management roles and community leadership. A Wellcome-funded report highlights the importance of “software maintainer” for instance as a leadership position that is critical in sustaining research infrastructure.¹² Technical leadership is critical in shaping and exploiting national DRI, and for embedding skills within specific research domains.¹³ This includes concepts such as “Green RSE” (promoting environmentally responsible research, in accordance with the Concordat for the Environmental Sustainability of Research and Innovation Practice), ethical use of technology, best practices in information governance, etc. We will thread such themes throughout the Network’s activities, including as assessment criteria for our flexible fund.

Network structure and outcomes

Our core activities will be structured as 5 work packages, centred around the themes of community, skills, and careers, with enabling work on network management and impact evaluation. Each looks to yield specific outcomes supporting the aims of the call.

The overall output will be recommendations for the sector, based on our studies and initiatives trialled within the flexible fund, of key activities to continue and expand, supported by the dRTP community. The connections forged through this Network will underpin that future work.

1. Network Management (Lead: UCL)
   1. Flexible fund allocations align with the aims of the Network and enhance our impact.
2. Community (Lead: EPCC)
   1. Stronger links are built between the RSE community and related groups of dRTPs to underpin sustainable initiatives.
   2. The equality, diversity, inclusivity and accessibility (EDIA) of our communities are measurably improved, with people from a wide range of backgrounds, roles, and disciplines having taken part in Network activities.
3. Advanced Skills (Lead: UoM)
   1. A complete, flexible competencies framework, along with a web-based assessment and monitoring tool, for RSEs and related dRTPs, which is regularly updated subject to community review.
   2. New cohorts of managers and leaders have been trained and demonstrate a progression to more senior positions within the dRTP community.
   3. Successfully trialled leadership training approaches are integrated into community-based, institutional or professional training programmes.
4. Careers (Lead: UCL)
   1. Detailed guidance for dRTP group leaders is available on the relative merits of different structures and processes according to context.
   2. Flexible, standards-aligned career frameworks for RSEs and adjacent dRTPs are adopted by multiple institutions.
5. Impact Monitoring and Evaluation (Lead: UoM)
   1. The impacts of all core and flexibly-funded Network activities are catalogued and disseminated widely.
   2. Changes are made to institutional policies to increase recognition of and support for dRTPs.

Collectively these outcomes address the five UKRI strategic themes for DRI, directly and indirectly. We improve dRTP leadership skills and career pathways (theme 4) and in so doing enhance skills in the dRTP workforce generally (4). We promote development of improved techniques and practices in dRTP (5) which lead to better foundational tools (5). Together these deliver the workforce able to build and run large-scale compute & data infrastructure (2 & 1), with advanced understanding of security and sensitive data processing (3), and who can train users to exploit these facilities (1-3).

References