CyberTraining: Pilot: A Professional Development and Certification Program for Cyberinfrastructure Facilitators

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This CyberTraining pilot project is initiating the Certified Cyberinfrastructure Facilitator Training and Development (CCIFTD) program, a first-of-its-kind, non-matriculated certification of professional development for Cyberinfrastructure Facilitators. The Cyberinfrastructure (CI) workforce suffers from a critical deficit of CI Facilitators, who work directly with researchers to advance the computing-intensive/data-intensive aspects of their research. CCIFTD's purpose is to attest to proficiency in core skills needed for facilitating computing/data-intensive research, across all Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. The focus is on crucial professional/interpersonal (soft) skills, and complementary research computing technical topics. CCIFTD will establish both (A) the set of skills and (B) a means for determining whether a CI Facilitator has these skills and thus merits certification. This project promotes the progress of science by accelerating STEM research, in particular by training and certifying a national cohort of research computing professionals who work directly with STEM researchers to advance the computing/data-intensive aspects of their research. Such research is becoming increasingly important across all STEM disciplines, while at the same time large scale and advanced computing is becoming more challenging to learn. Financial efficiency is achieved via a "train the trainers" approach: every Facilitator trained by CCIFTD is anticipated to work with dozens or hundreds of researchers over their career.The project has a well-defined methodology: 1. Determine the skills that are most valuable for CI Facilitation, by surveying (i) experienced CI Facilitators, (ii) CI organization leaders such as supercomputing center directors, and (iii) STEM researchers who use CI. 2. Develop for each such skill a training mechanism, an examination instrument, and its scoring rubric, via pilot testing at workshops and via online resources. 3. Construct certification pathways, namely subsets of badges that, collectively, merit certification. 4. Test badging methods. 5. Evaluate the success of the CCIFTD program both during this pilot project and at the end, to improve CCIFTD as it progresses and to determine how successful it has been. The project objectives include: 1. From the perspective of CI Facilitators: (a) Provide both training and proof of mastery in skills that are mission critical to CI Facilitation; and (b) Cultivate and expand the CI Facilitators community. 2. From the perspective of CI organizations: Increase uptake of CI Facilitation services, and therefore of CI. 3. From the perspective of STEM researchers: Increase computing/data-intensive STEM research productivity, by applying CI expertise that many STEM researchers lack.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.