Competencies for bioinformatics core facility scientists: extension of the ISCB competency framework for bioinformatics

Abstract

Competencies; Bioinformatics

Competencias; Bioinformática

Competències; Bioinformàtica

Motivation The competency framework of the International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB) provides a benchmark for capturing the knowledge, skills, and attitudes required by bioinformatics professionals. Whilst it provides a minimum standard for various bioinformatics roles, it does not capture how competency requirements change as bioinformatics professionals progress from junior to senior, and from primarily technical to managerial positions. Bioinformatics core facility professionals are crucial for data-driven bioscience, yet lack a defined career structure, leaving a career-development vacuum. The ISCB education and BioInfoCore communities worked together to define a new subset of competency requirements to support core facility teams to recruit, develop, and retain their staff. Results Drawing on the experience of the ISCB’s BioInfoCore community, and building on the work of others, we extend the competencies required by staff in bioinformatics core facilities operations and management, defining six competency requirements (in addition to 13 defined in the ISCB Competency Framework) that are especially relevant to core facility professionals: N: identify and support users’ needs, O: manage projects, P: manage team members, Q: engage with users and other collaborators, R: provide training in bioinformatics, and S: lead the bioinformatics core facility. We map these to a framework for career progression. Availability and implementation The framework is reproduced in full in this paper and is available as a CSV file on Zenodo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.16630540). It will soon be made available on the Competency Hub at https://competency.ebi.ac.uk/. Data and figures are available on GitHub at https://github.com/downingtim/Competencies.

This work has been supported by: The European Molecular Biology Laboratory (to M.L.-L., P.C.-L., L.P. and C.B.), the German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure de.NBI (to L.P.) the Pirbright Institute’s funding from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) grant BBS/E/PI/23NB0004 (to T.D.), Stowers Institute for Medical Research (to M.G.), the Harvard Medical School Foundry (to S.H.S.), the State Agency for Research (Agencia Estatal de Investigación) for the financial support as a Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa (CEX2020-001024-S/AEI/10.13039/501100011033), the CRIS contra el Cáncer Foundation (grant PR_TCL_2020-10), the Cellex Foundation (to L.N.), The Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge (to A.J.R.) and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), National Institutes of Health (UL1TR002553 to G-M.P.).