Your role: Trainer

Introduction

As a trainer, you design or deliver training courses in research software development and quality for specific research domain or in general. Your primary audience is PhD students, postdocs, researchers and technicians who code or early career Research Software Engineers (RSEs).

Your role is to emphasise the importance of applying best practices in software development, including the FAIR principles, and also to provide your audience with the skills necessary to put these principles into practice throughout their projects.

In addition to the usual abilities required for a trainer (communication, pedagogy, problem-solving), flexibility is key as you have to deal with an audience of several domains, skills and levels of involvement.

Software development & quality responsibilities, challenges & tasks

As a trainer, you :

• are responsible for encouraging and guiding researchers and scientists in effectively creating and managing their software during the entire research lifecycle.
• play a critical role in assisting individuals and organisations in improving their data management skills and achieving their research goals.
• engage with various stakeholders to determine precise training needs and establish a tailored schedule for training sessions.
• may design effective training programmes to ensure the delivered training empower participants with actionable skills and knowledge.
• may develop educational material, such as slide decks, short training courses, and online resources. These materials should be clear and concise, enabling the trainees to understand and implement effective data management strategies.
• make sure that the training material is open and satisfies accessibility requirements of a broad audience.
• deliver training sessions, interactive workshops, and webinars to educate researchers on software quality best practices, policies, and guidelines. This involves explaining the importance of software quality, introducing relevant resources and tools, and providing hands-on training on software development and quality.
• implement a feedback system (e.g. via surveys and questionnaires) to enhance the quality and impact of your training programs, assess if learning outcomes are met and to improve learning outcomes and the training effectiveness.

Software development & quality guidance

• Task pages in RSQKit are organised around regular software development and quality tasks and challenges. You will find best practices, guidelines and links to training materials.
• Life science training portal TeSS
• Environmental science ENVRI community training platform
• Photon & neutron science training platform
• Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) training resources at SSH Open Marketplace
• Carpentries Instructor Training is a program designed to prepare researchers, educators, and technical professionals to teach foundational coding and data skills in line with Carpentries pedagogy—which emphasises inclusive, evidence-based teaching practices.
• Carpentries Lesson Development Training is a training curriculum teaching good practices in lesson design and development, and open source collaboration skills, using The Carpentries Workbench.
• Train-the-Trainer program by ELIXIR for life sciences relies in the development of new Train-the-Trainer (TtT) courses and materials with the aim to give new instructors tools and tips for providing and enriching learning experiences to trainees and to include best-practice guidance on course and training material development
• DIgital REsearch CompeTencies (DIRECT) Framework

The EVERSE project is currently curating a set of relevant training resources that will be of relevance to anyone in this role across a number of scientific domains.

Contributors