What tools do we need to help navigate the training landscape?

8 January 2026

The CHARTED project will connect existing or potential digital research technical professionals (dRTPs) in the UK to training opportunities, skills, and roles to support their professional development.

One strand of CHARTED (Connecting Hub for Advancing the RTP Talent Enabling DRI) focuses on how to provide tools and frameworks to help learners find the right training for their needs, including by navigating training between different providers. Recently we held a discussion with some of the organisations that provide training material or related tools to Digital Research Technical Professional (dRTP) learners:

Tools for learning

The focus of the conversation was ideas for tools that could be developed to help learners and creators of training content, and the work required to support those tools.

Some of the tools that were identified included providing ways for learners to assess their skills and align themselves with existing skill or role pathways. For example, this could be through the use of pre-defined competencies, or by specifying the type of job they have (or want). From there, the learner could be linked to training suitable for developing those specific areas, or other areas relevant to that job. 

Other suggestions included creating more tools for learners to find training such as through repositories, diagnostic questionnaires to identify what they need to know, and recommendations from other learners. 

It was also agreed that better support to help learners put together training from different organisations would be beneficial. For example, if a learner had identified a course they wanted to take but did not have the prerequisite knowledge, they could be directed to other courses that would provide that knowledge, regardless of the organisation that offered them.

There are existing tools that address some of these aims, and we’ve put together a list of current resources at the end of the article. However, it was clear that further work could be done to truly help learners navigate the existing training, and to better support and connect people developing and delivering training content. 

Training metadata

In order to do so however, the conversation identified more work that would be needed to provide useful metadata about the training that's available, and ideas for tools that could help providers to do so. These could be tools to help training creators specify learning outcomes and prerequisites in a more standardised way (to support interoperability between different providers), and tools to help specify those as machine-readable metadata. 

FAIR training

Supporting learners to make better use of training will involve making new or existing training more FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable), and that’s a key aim of the CHARTED project. Tools that could help training creators to assess the FAIRness of their material and provide actionable suggestions to improve it, as has been done for FAIR data and FAIR software, could greatly help with this aim.

The outcome of this conversation, along with other planned consultations, will be used to design the funding calls that CHARTED will be releasing through its Flexible fund. About a third of the total fund will be dedicated to support the creation of some of these proposed tools.

Improving the training ecosystem can only happen when different groups come together and CHARTED aims to continue to facilitate that. For example the “FAIRifying the dRTP Training Ecosystem” session we recently held at Computing Insight UK 2025.

Get involved

Please get in touch if you are creating or providing training to dRTPs, or are interested in doing so, and would like to discuss ideas. 

Anyone can join the CHARTED mailing list to be notified of funding calls and other developments in CHARTED. Please also sign up if you are interested in being a reviewer for the applications.

CHARTED is funded by the UKRI Digital Research Infrastructure Programme as part of the digital Research Technical Professional Skills NetworkPlus Call. 

Links

Existing projects and resources that were mentioned in the discussion described above include:

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Dr Steven Carlysle-Davies
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Steven Carlysle-Davies