RCD Career Arcs

Career Arcs Work completed!

We have completed the deliverables identified in our charter, published the results, and presented at several PEARC conferences. The last deliverable was our poster, A Visualization of Patterns and Themes in RCD Professional Career Paths (also here for those without ACM access). See also the full-size graphic of the visualization on Zenodo.

This was the result of a series of face-to-face interviews with current or past RCD professionals to understand RCD career trajectories more deeply. Thanks to everyone who participated, and regrets that we could not interview everyone who volunteered!

We coded the interviews under an IRB-approved protocol, produced de-identified summaries of the interviews, and working group members worked to identify patterns and themes.

Working Group Background and Activities

This group created resources for Research Computing and Data (RCD) Professionals to explain RCD career options and help existing RCD professionals explore professional development and advancement. These resources will also aid in recruiting a larger and more diverse pipeline into the RCD profession.

People across a range of roles support research computing and data (RCD) services; the community of people in these roles is evolving into  a distinct profession, and is widely understood to be an integral part of scholarly research. However, distinct RCD roles are relatively new and it is not obvious to people outside of these roles how their skills and experience map to the RCD profession. This is a serious barrier to recruitment and to the development of a “pipeline” into these roles. In addition, staff currently in RCD roles lack resources to help them grow into new roles and more generally to create a professional development plan; this undermines retention of these skilled professionals.

An additional benefit of the resources we built is as an analytic tool to identify gaps and needs for missing training programs that will facilitate the transition from other positions into RCD roles, and, e.g., to develop existing RCD staff into RCD leadership roles.

The Career Arcs activity began with discussions at the 2018 CI Professionalization workshop.

Career Arcs co-chairs: Sam Porter (University of Maryland), Patrick Schmitz (Semper Cogito)

Thanks to our previous Career Arcs co-chair: Arman Pazouki (Purdue)

Works Products

A number of these were in collaboration with the RCD Professionalization WG.