This project aims to define a skills and competencies framework to help us classify and describe technical and non-technical skills we use in our different roles as researchers, RSEs, data specialists, RSE group leads, PIs, etc., along with lists of tools/methods/behaviours to demonstrate skills and training materials that can help us gain a particular skill.
A sister project works on implementing a Django webapp to enable practical use of the framework - to browse the skills and competencies, self-assess and create individual skill profiles as “competency wheels”, compare profiles across a team, define template skills for different digital roles (e.g. a data archivist, a data scientists or an RSE with HPC specialism) and other use cases.
This repository was originally created from the work that happened at the Software Sustainability Institute's Collaborations Workshop 2023 Hack Day.
The idea was to construct a resource on technical skills that is for the RSE community and curated by the RSE community, along with training materials that can help people gain a particular skill, and visualise people's individual skill profiles as "competency wheels".
The project was added to the RSE Competencies Toolkit organisation and as a resource to support RSEs (Research Software Engineers) in tracking and managing their professional development. We have now extracted the work into its own separate GitHub organisation.
Note that, while we've focussed on RSEs during the early stages of development, this tool could be used for any roles that used digital skills for research (and we have now expanded the framework to reflect that).
The project comprised:
- An RSE competency framework, outlining a structured set of skills that are useful when working as an RSE, with examples of how these skills can be demonstrated at different levels of experience. Not all RSEs will or need to have all skills at all levels.
- A curated set of training resources, linked to the skills and levels from the competency framework.
- A tool to visualise and compare different competency profiles.
The project aimed to support the following uses:
- Recording and visualising your competency profile as an individual RSE.
- Comparing competency profiles across a group of RSEs (e.g. to show the commonalities and variety across RSEs doing the same role at the same level at the same organisation, or comparing across organisations).
- Find high-quality training resources to improve skills in a particular competency.
- Define aspirational competency profiles, illustrate the gap to your current profile and highlight training resources that could help bridge that gap.
The project won the 3rd prize at CW23 and we have carried on with the work on this project after the initial prototype. Since then, we have compared our work with many related skill frameworks to make sure they are aligned and skills are not missed.
We have also consulted the wider RSE community at RSECon24 about the skills they use, where loads of non-technical/professional skills emerged.
We have now expanded the remit of the framework to include non-technical as well as technical skills that are used in a wide variety of digital professional roles (and not just RSEs) such as researchers, data specialists (stewards, archivists, etc.), RSE group leads, PIs, etc.
Skills and competencies are described in the framework file and we have a GitHub issue to track suggestions.
If you think skills are missing, needs clarification, or could be reorganised within the framework, please add your feedback to the GitHub issue to track suggestions.
We have a document defining skill levels and a GitHub issue to track suggestions.
The skill levels describe a scale to help measure/describe ability to demonstrate a particular skill (i.e. an individual’s competency level for a particular skill).
We have a file with resources for professional development mapped to skills in the framework.
If you would like to suggest resources to add to the collection, please add them to the GitHub issue on curation.
We reviewed a number of related work into defining skills and competencies:
- CSCCE Skills Wheel
- BCS SFIAplus IT Skills Framework and SFIA v8, the current standard
- NIH Competencies Proficiency Scale
- King's Digital Lab Research Software Careers Learnings
- Job Descriptions and Framework for the UCL Centre for Advanced Research Computing (ARC) Research Software Engineer
- Research Software Engineer at the Netherlands eScience Center: Job Description
- Met Office's Science Professional Skills Framework
- Foundational Competencies and Responsibilities of a Research Software Engineer by the German RSE community
- Skills Used by RSEs, by the US-RSE community
- Skills Base - Skills Management Framework
- JISC Digital Capability
- Civil Service Competency Framework
- Competencies, training resources and career profiles in computational biology
- Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) Digital Research Capabilities and Skills Framework: The Framework and Its Components
- Lightcast skills taxonomy
- UNIVERSE-HPC project skills and pathways
- SDE Skills Competency Framework - mapping the skills and knowledge needed by Research Technical Professionals (RTPs) working with Secure Data Environments
The webapp part of the project is now in a separate repository.
This page tracks the public documents that have been used for community discussions and development.
- DIRECT skills & competencies framework
- Skill levels definition - in Markdown and JSON
- Slide deck
- Example skill profiles (see tabs at the bottom)
- Resources for professional development and the original CW23 resource spreadsheet (not currently matching)
- Internal Google drive folder with various documents, presentations, etc.
- Collaborations Workshop 23 Hack Day
The whole team (working on the framework and the webapp) meets once a month on the second Wednesday, 11:00 – 11:55 GMT/BST.
The framework and webapp teams also meet separately in between these meetings to work on issues specific for each part of the project.
Current project team (in alphabetical order by first name):
- Adrian D'Alessandro
- Aleksandra Nenadic
- Aman Goel
- Becky Osselton
- Connor Aird
- Dave Horsfall
- Emma Hogan
- Eli Chadwick
- Gabriel Hanganu
- Matt Craddock
- Phil Reed
- Sam Bland
- Tamora James
Former project team members (in alphabetical order by first name):
- Hannah Williams
- Diego Alonso Álvarez
- Matthew Bluteau
CW25 hack day team working on the project (in alphabetical order by first name):
- Adrian D’Alessandro
- Aleksandra Nenadic
- Andrew Gait
- Bryn Ubald
- Connor Aird
- Tamora James
- Patricia Loto
- Phil Reed
- Ryan Smith
CW25 workshop 2.4 saw additional contributions to the framework (in alphabetical order by first name):
- Camille Santistevan
- Ella Kaye
- Jonathan Cooper
- Samantha Wittke
- Sarah Gibson
- Toby Hodges
Original CW23 hack day team that started the project (in alphabetical order by first name):
- Aleksandra Nenadic
- Aman Goel
- Dave Horsfall
- Diego Alonso Álvarez
- Eli Chadwick
- Hannah Williams
- Iain Barrass
- Lieke de Boer
- Martin O’Reilly
- Matthew Bluteau
- Nadine Spychala
- Paul K Korir
- Sean Marshallsay
Anyone is welcome to contribute suggestions, feedback, and/or PRs to address any open issues. You can also open a new issue if your idea is not yet mentioned anywhere else.
If you'd like to get in touch with the project team - email us at direct-framework@googlegroups.com.
We also use #direct-framework channel under the RSE Community Slack (ukrse.slack.com).
Unless otherwise specified on particular materials, all material in this repository is licensed as follows:
- Code is licenced under the 3-clause BSD licence.
- Documentation, data and other written material is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC-BY 4.0).
Please cite this work as follows:
@article{RSECompetenciesToolkit2023,
title={RSE Competencies Toolkit},
author={RSE Competencies Toolkit team},
journal={GitHub},
year={2023}
}
The initial version of this repository was created during the Software Sustainability Institute Collaborations Workshop 2023 (CW23) Hack Day. Subsequent development was guided by a number of unconference sessions and contributions by RSE community members during RSECon23, RSECon24 and CW25.
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