CaRCC Membership and Participation
Membership and Participation in our RCD Communities: What is it and how are we doing? In PEARC ’24: Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing 2024: Human Powered Computing, 17 July 2024, Providence, RI, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA.
See also the latest CaRCC Town Hall slides.
RCD Workforce Survey Data
2025 RCD Workforce Survey
The 2025 survey updates the 2021 survey, with 818 valid responses from RCD professionals in the US and Canada. Its products so far:
- Paper: Understanding RCD Work: A Mixed-Methods Analysis of Activities, Complexities, and the Compensation of RCD Professionals in the US and Canada. In Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing 2026: Resilient Roots + Empowered Communities (PEARC ’26), July 26–30, 2026, Minneapolis, MN, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA.
- The 2025 RCD Workforce Survey instrument (Zenodo)
- Qualitative analysis codebook for the PEARC ’26 paper (Zenodo)
- Workflow and code for the paper’s descriptive statistics, data processing, and visualizations (Zenodo)
- Workflow for generating the thematic code counts in the paper’s Table 2 (Zenodo)
2021 RCD Workforce Survey
Data on the demographics, education, and work experience of RCD professionals; their current positions and experience working in the RCD field; and their compensation and job responsibilities.
Explore the Survey Data.
Workforce Survey Paper: Characterizing the US Research Computing and Data (RCD) Workforce. In Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC ’22), July 10–14, 2022, Boston, MA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA.
Workforce Survey Data Visualizations
RCD Career Arcs Data
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. The CaRCC Career Arcs Working Group developed a set of resources to address these challenges. See:
- PEARC25 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.
- Understanding Factors that Influence Research Computing and Data Careers. Best Full Paper, Workforce Development, Training, Diversity, and Education; and Phil Andrews award, granted to a manuscript deemed to be the most impactful in practice of research computing. In Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC ’22), July 10–14, 2022, Boston, MA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA. (See here if you lack ACM access)
- Extended data and graphs for the 2022 Career Arcs survey
- CaRCC Research Computing and Data Career Arcs 2021 Survey
Research Software Engineers International Survey
Survey of RSEs from around the world. Learn more here.
Presentations
- Presentation at the RDAP 2022 Summit: Data Professionals and Data Responsibilities in the Research Data and Computing Workforce
- Panel at PEARC19 (July 30, 2019): Professionalization and Career Arcs for Roles Supporting Compute- and Data-intensive Research, slides
- Champions Webinar October 29, 2019: Encore of Professionalization and Career Arcs for Roles Supporting Compute- and Data-intensive Research. video, slides
- Presented to Coalition for Networked Information Spring Meeting, April 8, 2019. slides
- Presented CI Professionalization overview to Campus Champions October 16, 2018: video, slides
- Presented CI Professionalization overview to Virtual Residency Program: August 9, 2018.
- Report out from the CaRC Workshop on CI Professionalization to CASC, March 14, 2018 slides.