The CHARTED project aims to connect existing or potential digital research technical professionals (dRTPs) in the UK to training opportunities, skills, and roles to support their professional development. One strand of that is focused on how to provide tools and frameworks that can help learners find the training that is right for their needs, including by navigating training between different providers. Recently, we held a discussion with some of the organisations providing training material or related tools to dRTP learners:

The aim of the conversation was to discuss ideas for tools that could be developed to help learners and training content creators, and the tasks that would be needed to support those tools.

Some of the tools that were identified included providing ways for learners to assess their skills and align themselves with existing skill or role pathways. For example, this could be through the use of pre-defined competencies, or by specifying the type of job they have (or want). From there, the learner could be linked to training suitable for developing those specific areas, or relevant to that job. Other suggestions included more tools for learners to find training such as through repositories, diagnostic questionnaires to identify what they need to know, and recommendations from other learners. It was also agreed that better support to help learners put together training from different organisations would be beneficial. For example, if a learner had identified a course they wanted to take but did not have the required prerequisite knowledge, they could be directed to other courses that could provide that knowledge, regardless of the organisation that offered them.

There are existing tools that address some of these aims, and we’ve put together a list of current resources at the end of the article. However, it was clear there was further work that could be done to truly help learners navigate the existing training, and to better support and connect people developing and delivering training content.

In order to do so however, the conversation identified more work that would be needed to provide useful metadata about the training that’s provided, and ideas for tools that could help providers to do so. These could be tools to help training creators to specify learning outcomes and prerequisites in a more standardised way, to support interoperability between different providers, and tools to help specify those as machine-readable metadata. Supporting learners to make better use of training will involve making new or existing training more FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable), and that’s a key aim of the CHARTED project. Tools that could help training creators to assess the FAIRness of their material and provide actionable suggestions to improve it, as has been done for FAIR data and FAIR software, could greatly help with this aim.

The outcome of this conversation, along with other planned consultations, will be used to design the funding calls that CHARTED will be releasing through its Flexible fund. About a third of the total fund will be dedicated to support creating some of these proposed tools.

Improving the training ecosystem can only happen when different groups come together and CHARTED aims to continue to facilitate that. We’ll be continuing to hold discussions with training providers and learners, including a breakout session at Computing Insight UK 2025. The “FAIRifying the dRTP Training Ecosystem” session will be held on Thursday 4th December at 11:30-13:00 in the Exchange Rooms 9-11 at the Manchester Convention Centre. Please come and join us!

If you are creating or providing training to dRTPs, or are interested in doing so, and would like to discuss ideas please get in touch. Anyone can also join the CHARTED mailing list to be notified of funding calls and other developments in CHARTED. Please also sign up if you are interested in being a reviewer for the applications.

CHARTED is funded by the UKRI Digital Research Infrastructure Programme as part of the digital Research Technical Professional Skills NetworkPlus Call.

Existing projects or resources that were mentioned in the call include: