Reframing Data Stewardship Education in Denmark and abroad

This report is part of the Data Stewardship Education in Denmark Project.

Abstract

Whether employed in the corporate or in the university realm, a Data Steward’s role is to ensure that the data management practises of the organisation follow established governance policies, standards or best practises. The Data Steward is in a position of trust, having responsibility for the governance, management and exploitation possibilities of a researcher’s or enterprise’s data. However, the professionalisation of Data Stewardship can only move forward and become stronger with improved data steward education opportunities. In this paper we explore the differences and commonalities in academic and corporate approaches to educating data stewards. The aim is to process a set of recommendations that can guide the development of novel data steward educations in Denmark. A content and thematic analysis of 24 current data stewardship educations, 8 academic and 16 corporate,  was conducted resulting in identification of 5 recommendations. These are:

• (1) Collaboration between academia and industry result in relevant educations that have a stronger recognition in stakeholder communities, including potential employers, thus improving the student’s
• (2) employability
• (3) Course design based on experiential learning creates motivation and presents the student with real-life requirements to data stewardship.
• (4) Skills and competencies must not be limited to technical proficiency. Being able to assess the value of Data Stewardship, communicate, teach, soft skills, have disciplinary knowledge and the ability to project manage are, amongst, requirements for curricula development.
• (5) Association certification is recommended. Certification should be renewed, and further education opportunities should be offered to indicate commitment to skill maintenance.

KEYWORDS: data stewardship; education; further education; corporate education; enterprise education; academic education;

Data Files (NVIVO file and Coding Scheme) for this report to be found at the Zenodo Community.