Our Skills gap: meeting the challenge Alison Sutton, Dimity Flanagan , Nancy Pontika, Valerie McCutcheon

1. Our skills gap:
meeting the
challenge
ALISON SUTTON
DIMITY FLANAGAN
NANCY PONTIKA
VALERIE MCCUTCHEON
SC3
UKCORR MEMBERS’ DAY
30 SEPTEMBER 2019
BRITISH LIBRARY

2. Scholarly Communication
Competencies Coalition
 In 2017 a group of information professionals came
together to discuss the growing skills gap in hiring
new staff for scholarly communication/research
support positions.
 SC3 has been focused on identifying and mapping the
core skills of scholarly communications support with
current training offers.
 SC3 has run workshops across the UK to understand
what staff on the ground feel is vital to scholcomm
roles and whether there is enough training and
support for professional development.
SC3

3. Work thus far
 Collecting views from those who work in the field
 Examples: varying responsibilities across institutions, lack of progression paths,
gaining required knowledge can be difficult before entry, unrealistic job
requirements, sharing more useful than training.
 Workshop on training needs and professional development options
 Research on educational background and skills analysis of scholarly
communication teams
 Developing a resource of current training (to be mapped to competency
framework)
 Cambridge University ran a Research Support Ambassador Programme
and have now made it available online
SC3

4. Job descriptions
 LIBER Quarterly article http://bit.ly/roles-jobs
 19 general skills
 33 specific skills
 OA = 8, IR = 13, RDM = 12
 A position holder expected to be a specialist in more than one topic
 Not always clear lines between roles
 A library degree is not generally required, attention to previous working
experience
 Is there a gap in the RDM roles?
SC3

5. What do scholarly communication
roles support?
© European Union, reuse permitted
https://web.archive.org/web/20170320225909/ht
tp://ec.europa.eu/research/openscience/index.cf
m?pg=home&section=monitor
SC3

6. NASIG Scholarly Communication
Competencies
Repository
management
Publishing
services
Copyright
services
Data
management
Assessment and
impact metrics
CommunicationCollaboration
Enthusiasm Generalist
Personable
Comfortable with
change
SC3

7. Questions
 Which skills are the most important for research support in open access, repository
management, publishing advice, bibliometrics and research data management?
 What skills are we short of? (you can think about this question both in terms of
your own skills and the skills available in your team at your university)
 What are the challenges in acquiring the skills you want to develop?
 Does the SC3 spreadsheet help with this? See http://bit.ly/SC3training
 Which skills are catered for or missing?
 What other training do you know about?
 What would you like to share?
SC3

8. Next steps
 Mapping resources and training to an updated version of NASIG
competencies
 Putting this document on UKCoRR for community ownership
 Further resources available at:
http://www.ukcorr.org/partnerships/sc3-scholarly-communication-
competencies-coalition/
SC3