Cohort-Based Leadership Training and Mentoring Opportunities: End-of-Project Outcomes!
Oscar Seip, Research Community Manager at the Institute for Research Software shares the outcomes of his recent DisCouRSE funded project and the project’s plans for the future.
Identifying the Need
This short 5-month project aimed to deliver cohort-based Open Leadership training and mentoring for the current cohort of Institute for Research Software (formerly known as the Software Sustainability Institute) Fellows around soft skills, leadership, and community management. Through our work with the Fellows, and the needs they raised with us, we identified a clear gap in current UK dRTP training around non-technical skills such as project and community management. While our Fellowship Programme currently provides important practical and financial support, as well as peer learning through our study groups and mentoring, it did not yet include structured training in these areas.
So, we took this training gap as an opportunity to complement the support we offer to our Fellows and which we intend to extend in the future to the wider dRTP community to become recognised as ambassadors of good practice and maximise their impact.
Delivering Requirements
To better understand the shape of the identified training and skills gap, we first ran a survey among our Fellows (respondents spanned the 2015–2026 cohorts) and asked them to rank their training priorities and suggest topics for future sessions. The results confirmed and nuanced that non-technical skills were consistently in demand, particularly around research community management, open leadership, and open collaboration or project management.
Rather than building this new training from scratch, we identified two existing, well-tested frameworks that directly addressed this gap and adapted them for the Fellows context: OLS’s Open Seeds Programme, focused on open science principles and project leadership, and the RCM Cooperative’s RCM 101, focused on research community management.
We delivered this training as four half-day cohort sessions, run over two months in partnership with OLS and the RCM Cooperative. These sessions covered: Tooling for Project Design; Tools for Open Collaboration; Open Science Essentials; Open Infrastructure; Research Community Management; and Open Leadership in Practice. Throughout, Fellows worked on their own Fellowship projects with support from the facilitators and existing mentors. They produced outputs as part of the sessions, including a completed Open Canvas and roadmap, a new project repository with README, licence, and Code of Conduct, a community governance plan, and a personal leadership reflection that they could share with their mentor.
Assessing the Impact
The programme was very well received, with all respondents rating the sessions as either “Very useful” or “Somewhat useful,” with no negative ratings recorded across any session. A few sessions stood out as highlights. The Tools for Open Collaboration session was one of the highest-rated overall; Fellows especially valued the Darmok Translation Exercise. The Open Leadership in Practice panel and community clinics were also highly rated, with several Fellows describing the personal and honest accounts shared by speakers on career progression, failure, and community building, as well as the clinic format, which was praised for creating a safe and supportive space to discuss everyone’s challenges.
All session recordings are publicly available on YouTube and the complete curriculum is published with learning objectives and slides on Zenodo. This highlights our intention to extend the impact of the training beyond the cohort itself and share the outputs and resources with the wider dRTP community.
The Future
We are pleased to announce that the project was successful in applying for growth funding in the second round of DisCouRSE funding. Over the next 10 months we will evaluate what worked and what did not and will use participant feedback and outcomes data to improve content, delivery formats, and the mapping to DIRECT Framework competencies. This work has already contributed two new skills pages to the DIRECT Framework: Community Building and Leadership and Community Governance and Management.
“Working with the Institute for Research Software Fellows, I see how much is expected of dRTPs in terms of leading communities, managing projects, and promoting best research software practices without the structured training to do so. With the support of the DisCouRSE project, and OLS’s and the RCM Cooperative expertise in cohort-based open leadership training and community building, we were able to develop training that aimed to address this gap. Using the Institute Fellows as a test case, I believe the resulting training helps dRTPS to acquire the necessary skills for becoming recognised as leaders in their fields and amplifying their impact –and we’re very keen to keep developing it and share it with the wider community”.
Oscar Seip Research Community Manager