Birds of a Feather: CCIFTD: Certified Cyberinfrastructure Facilitator Training & Development

Overview: The CCIFTD program is a first-of-its-kind, non-matriculated certification of professional development for CI Facilitators. CCIFTD’s role is to show proficiency in core skills for facilitating computing/data-intensive research, across all STEM disciplines. The emphasis is on crucial professional/interpersonal skills, and complementary CI technical topics. CCIFTD focuses on establishing both (a) the set of skills and (b) a means for determining mastery.

Motivation: The CI workforce suffers from a critical deficit of CI Facilitators, who are the CI professionals who work directly with researchers to advance computing/data-intensive aspects of their research, a vital role at many research-intensive institutions. Currently, there is a clear sense of the nature and value of the CI Facilitator role, but no well-defined set of skills agreed upon by the CI Facilitator community at large.

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 badges for each such skill, specifically a training mechanism, an examination instrument, and its scoring rubric, via pilot testing at workshops and online. 3. Construct certification pathways, subsets of badges that collectively merit certification. 4. Test badging methods. 5. Evaluate the CCIFTD program, both formatively during this pilot project and summatively at the end, to improve CCIFTD as it progresses and to determine how successful it has been.

Discussion Topics (time might not permit covering all of these topics)

·       CCIFTD training at the 2025 Virtual Residency Introductory/Intermedia workshop (held June 25-28) and the 2025 Virtual Residency Advanced workshop (Aug 6-7)

·       Status of badge training modules, badge examinations, badge examination scoring rubrics

·       Update on evaluation, especially the status of surveys to discover recommended topics (experienced CI Facilitators, CI organization leaders, researchers experienced in using CI)

·       Experiences to date in developing examinations and scoring rubrics, and lessons learned