Your role: Trainer

Introduction

As a trainer, you design and deliver training courses in research data management with a focus on bioinformatics data. Your audience is mainly people in biomedical sciences: PhD students, postdocs, researchers, technicians and PIs.

Your role is to emphasise the importance of applying best practices in Research Data Management, including FAIR principles, and also to provide researchers with the skills necessary to put these principles into practice throughout their projects.

In addition to the usual abilities required for a trainer (communication, pedagogy, problem-solving), flexibility is key as you have to deal with an audience of several domains, skills and levels of involvement.

Data management responsibilities

As a trainer you are responsible for encouraging and guiding researchers and scientists in effectively managing their data throughout the entire research lifecycle.

You play a critical role in assisting individuals and organisations in improving their data management skills and achieving their research goals.

In your role of trainer maker, you may need to:

• Collaborate with Data Managers to determine precise training needs and establish a tailored schedule for training sessions.
• Design effective training programs to ensure the delivered training empower participants with actionable skills and knowledge.
• Develop educational material, such as slide decks, training manuals, and online resources. These materials should be clear and concise, enabling the trainees to understand and implement effective data management strategies.
• Make sure that the training material is as FAIR and open as possible.
• Provide comprehensive training sessions, interactive workshops, and webinars to educate researchers on data management best practices, policies, and guidelines. This involves explaining the importance of data management, introducing relevant resources and tools, and providing hands-on training on data management.
• Implement a feedback system (e.g. surveys) to enhance the quality and impact of your training programs, and to improve learning outcomes and the training effectiveness.

Data management guidance

RDMkit pages

• Your task pages are organised around regular RDM tasks and challenges. You will find best practices, guidelines and training materials.
• The National resources pages provide country-specific guidance, to help you choose the best services, tools and pipelines to manage your data. Furthermore, it links to national training pages in TeSS.
• You can find an overview of all training recourses on the All training resources pages.

Other resources

• TeSS is a life science training portal, where you can search for training courses or materials on data management
• FAIR guiding principles gives an overview of how to make your data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR).
• The Train-the-Trainer program relies in the development of new Train-the-Trainer (TtT) courses and materials with the aim to give new instructors tools and tips for providing and enriching learning experiences to trainees and to include best-practice guidance on course and training material development
• Data Stewardship Wizard (DSW) guides you through creating a data management plan.
• Mantra Research Data Management Training is a free, online course with guidelines to help understanding and reflecting on how to manage the digital data collected throughout your research.

Contributors