Free training resources to upskill on research software topics

By Aleksandra Nenadic, SSI Training Lead.

There are many free and open training resources available to researchers and Research Software Engineers to upskill on various topics around software development, research data management/analysis, software project management, open and reproducible science, teaching and lesson development skills, and more. We listed some of them in our previous blog post “Training resources for researchers that want to learn to code”. Here, we expand that reference resource with more training entries. Note that this reference is not an exhaustive list - if you’d like a training resource mentioned here, please get in touch.

Some of these courses are being delivered at our Research Software Camp: Next Steps in Coding, 16 - 27 May 2022. To help you navigate the Camp’s schedule - we have created attendee profiles and signed-posted the Camp’s sessions based on the interests and current skill levels of our audiences. 

Jargon Busting Resources

If you are a beginner at developing code for your research or work, an excellent place to start is to familiarise yourself with the terminology used by the computational research communities. This is an important step as our learners come from different backgrounds, and may not be native English speakers – a term in one domain may mean something else entirely in another.

The Turing Way’s HandBook to reproducible, ethical and collaborative data science contains a very useful and comprehensive glossary of terms.

The Carpentries Glossario is another open-source and multilingual glossary of data science terms. 

The Carpentries workshops often start with a jargon-busting session to make sure everyone understands the terminology used - one such example is Library Carpentry’s Jargon Busting.

Computational Skills Resources

Beginners

If you are a researcher who's begun writing code/software for research, who perhaps aspires to improve their skills and how to apply them, and perhaps needs help understanding some research software-related problems - try the following introductory resources on software development, data management and analysis and open and reproducible research.

Beginner to Intermediate

For researcher developers and early career Research Software Engineers who have already attended some foundational training, the following beginner-intermediate resources may be of use to further their skills.

Intermediate

Check out the resources below for more experienced RSEs and researchers developers who started working on larger, more complex research software projects and are looking at the next steps to improve their skills further to overcome challenges in such projects, particularly around collaborating on research software development in teams.

Teaching and Training Development Skills

If you already have an RSE skills background, and have some experience with delivering teaching or training or some prior experience in building materials for knowledge transfer or training, and aspire to improve your teaching or lesson creation skills to train others (perhaps within local research domain groups or more widely as part of a project), the following training resources are for you.

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