People in Data

Convening a data professionals community to professionalise under-recognised data roles and provide support and training across the UK

Project status

Ongoing

Introduction

The UK is a global leader in science and research innovation, and data is at the heart of it. The importance of unlocking the power of data in the UK has been recognised in many government and public sector strategies, from the UK National Data Strategy, to more recently the Goldacre Report, Data Saves Lives, Reproducibility & Research Integrity Report, and the UKRI strategy. However, organisations do not always make the best use of data as it can often be hard to access, not in easily usable research formats, and often incomplete, unreliable or faulty. This is compounded by a lack of data skills across many sectors amplifying these challenges.

The People in Data Project aims to establish a Data Professional Community Hub – “People in Data” - across the UK’s broad data science ecosystem. Our project will bring together a connected network of existing communities but also create a community space for data professionals that do not identify with existing communities. We will map existing skills needs, resources, and engagement opportunities within the community, identifying gaps that can be addressed through the development of new training materials. Additionally, we will create a formalised business case for how to sustain this network, which could include plans for a data professionals society or merging into an existing community space.

Explaining the science

The National Audit Office report on ‘Challenges in using data across government’ highlights the current gap in data skills at several levels including storage, management, architecture, planning and governance. Many of these skills are essential for traditional data science research roles, and even more important for professionalising modern roles such as research engineers, data stewards, data wranglers, community managers, research application managers and more. These modern roles are often termed research infrastructure roles and are becoming important alternative career pathways for researchers. Therefore, there is a growing need to enable the upskilling of the current workforce, and identify the skills needed by the next generation of data professionals. Skills and career pathways has been identified as one of the pillars to achieve the UKRI’s vision of establishing a national digital research infrastructure.

Data literacy in particular is an underrepresented skill in data science that is perceived as mundane and technical, and it is therefore key to realise that roles in data, such as Data Wrangling and Data Stewardship, are important and crucial to impactful and reproducible data science outcomes.

Project aims

Our project 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.

We have three objectives:

1: Convene and promote an open community of Data Professionals across the UK’s data science ecosystem – People in Data.

2: Data Skills and Capacity Building across the People in Data community.

3: Develop a business case for how to sustain this network to continue supporting and developing the UK technical workforce in data professional roles.

To achieve these aims, we will work with a wide range of data science organisations from across the UK including Universities, Research Institutes, Professional societies, Government bodies and Industry. Current partners include ELIXIR-UK, Health Data Research UK and Natural History Museum.

 

"Data skills have never been more relevant to addressing the challenges faced by our planet. New environmental sensors and data from our digital collections are generating a wave of new information on the natural world. I cannot think of a more important time to be linking up and training the next generation of data professionals."

Vince Smith, Head of Digital, Data and Informatics at the Natural History Museum.


"As the National Institute for health data science, we connect data and expertise across the UK to make health data research and innovation happen at scale. Recognising the critical importance of fostering collaboration and knowledge exchange within the data science and technical community, we are delighted to support this important initiative."

Sarah Cadman, Programme Director for Capacity Building, Health Data Research UK. 

 

Organisers

Dr Emma Karoune

Senior Researcher - Research Community Building | Tools, Practices and Systems

Contact info

To join our community mailing list, please fill in our short survey - https://forms.office.com/e/t7X202cjSZ

We will shortly be sending more information with community updates and events information in the form of community newsletters and we will establish other communication channels such as a Slack workspace. 

 

For more information about this project, please email us at [email protected]