"People in Data" - skills and competencies

[metazool]

https://www.turing.ac.uk/research/research-projects/people-data - Turing Inst led networking initiative on "People in Data".

It aims to "convene an open community of data professionals, which promotes a culture that values and prioritises data and recognises people that work in data roles as essential to research"

Vision statement: "Moving the dial forward in terms of professionalisation for data roles"

https://londondataweek.org/events/#empowering-people-in-data-exploring-skills-and-building-community - panel opportunity during London Data Week, July 5th

[metazool]

The contributors to the Working Group are a mix of skills development professionals and practitioners. It aims to meet en masse like this once every 6 months for the duration of the project. Attendance looked like about 2/3 in-person, 1/3 remote with a single breakout group for everyone remote and this worked well, the organisers put thoughtful effort into making it a hybrid experience including a group photo with all the in-person contributors clustered around the wall of faces on the projector screen!

At this stage the focus is very much on developing a shared "competency framework" across the network of organisations. The afternoon workshop was taken up with how to develop "personas" that put a human face on an otherwise matrix-like set of skills, aptitudes and attitudes. Good example from EBI of what personae look like

• Recognition and progression for data roles that get classified and rewarded as administrative
• Identifying where there are "skills gaps" and having a precedent from other similar organisations to show HR at your own (e.g. "we can see where we need to recognise people are working as data managers")
• Help to plan for future recruitment needs (e.g. "we can identify why we need 6 new RSEs")
• Help figure out how to keep data and software practitioners around in organisations whose methods for offering status and opportunity are focused on other kinds of professional roles

The community part is less clearly outlined; it may be seen as "yet another forum" when people are already budgeting hard for time. You could see a case here to support shared contribution to open source / data projects as community-building, but what form would it take? Something like the SSI fellowship scheme but you could use it to buy back a month of your year?

Anyway, the organisers are planning to start a public github repo for the WG and deciding on what Slack-like forum is accessible for the different member organisations. I will link to the repo when they advertise it