a Strategic TEchnical Platform for University technical Professionals

The STEP-UP platform is a project to develop digital Research Technical Professionals (RTPs) and the support ecosystem needed for this.

New research areas and research processes require more advanced digital infrastructures. There is increasing demand for computational modelling, processing larger datasets, and creating more advanced research facilities, along with sharing results more openly across the world. This 'digital infrastructure' is the foundation of an increasing number of research domains, beyond those where computation and big datasets have been central for some time. Our project's starting point is that without trained, motivated people - a 'people infrastructure' of expert technical talent - along with the career opportunities to support them, these new and increasing demands won't be met, and research and its benefits will be held back.

The TALENT Commission report (2022) highlighted "... a need for ... ease of access to an aggregation of resource, which will be essential in providing an efficient e-infrastructure ecosystem. To achieve this, technical staff with the right skills are critical, such as research software engineers, research data professionals and systems administrators."

Our project team have extensive experience in supporting research software engineers through the Research Software London (RSLondon) community. We will build on this experience to support and train digital RTPs across software development, data management and processing, and computational infrastructure domains. Four institutions will pool their complementary expertise to achieve this, creating a support ecosystem beyond what any institution alone could, and that many others across the UK will benefit from. A community manager will develop our platform's supportive community and ensure that it is active and diverse, while a technical training lead will ensure that all training - technical and professional development - is produced and delivered to a high standard.

The UK Research and Innovation strategy 2022 to 2027 identifies a further problem to address clearly:

"We must redefine outdated views of a 'traditional' research career path, making more visible the full range of careers available in research and innovation... Many essential skills, capabilities and talents are undervalued."

Staff who feel undervalued will leave. For digital infrastructure professionals within universities this is sometimes about salary, given such high demand elsewhere, e.g. in tech startups and other industry roles. This presents a challenge for recruitment, while for retaining key staff the problems are different: the lack of a well-defined career path, and lack of recognition within research project teams and institutions where historically, the research itself has been the focus. Existing role structures within research organisations frequently create unhelpful barriers between researchers and technical staff. These structures also sustain an outdated view of academic versus technical accomplishment. Our platform will address these challenges in research technical careers and recognition head on. We will provide short term funding to develop a robust model for sharing technical talent within and across institutions, and for increasing awareness of its importance with researchers and institutional governance.

In summary, digital research infrastructure depends on skilled people. They are vitally important but underappreciated: they deserve a red carpet, not the brick walls they are more likely to encounter at present. We need a robust and long-term sustainable 'people platform' for digital technical professionals in university research: a skills infrastructure - to maximise return on investments in software, data, and infrastructure - which is what we propose to implement.