Aidan Wilson1
1Intersect Australia, Sydney, Australia
Biography:
Aidan Wilson is Intersect Australia’s Digital Research Services Manager, where he supervises a team of Digital Research Analysts, and manages Intersect’s Researcher Skills Training Program. Aidan has been heavily involved in training delivery and systems since he joined Intersect in 2015.
Prior to this, Aidan was a linguistics researcher working in the field of Australia’s Indigenous Languages, focusing in particular on the verb morphology of Traditional Tiwi, and other languages from the top-end, one of the most linguistically diverse regions on Earth. http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9858-5470
Abstract:
Since its inception in 2012, Intersect Australia's training program has taught more than 40,000 researchers across Australia, making Intersect the largest national provider of research technology training, and one of the largest globally.
This presentation will outline the factors that were critical to our success in realising a stable, sustainable, and scalable researcher skills training program: investment in an expert workforce of trainers; investment in systems and allocation of resources for training management, analytics, delivery and assessment; and support from member universities whose research communities benefit most from training, and who acknowledge the costs involved in delivering such a program, and thus value the service.
Our maturing in this space over the last decade has shaped our perspective on appropriate training practices that inform our internal policies and procedures. We believe wider adoption of these perspectives would greatly benefit the sector and drive research outcomes, noting two such perspectives in particular:
1. Training programs must be adequately funded
2. All workforce participation must be adequately remunerated
Having developed a stable platform, we are now looking forward to the next phase of strategy and development in the researcher skills space, exploring concepts such as: micro-credentials and recognition (of instructors as well as learners); skills mapping; and the federation of training opportunities and curricula, potentially leveraging and maximising platforms such as DReSA. As such we will share our vision for the future of researcher skills training, for both Intersect and Australia.