How to reach the Life Sciences community beyond Academia, in Industry and in the Job Seeking Market, through training? Inspired by this question, ELIXIR, its German Node and BioNT, put together a bioinformatics training needs survey. Besides providing valuable input for the survey collaborators, the results of the survey directly impacted BioNT’s training. This project builds on the experience of the survey and proposes what could be the next step.
BioNT develops and delivers free and openly accessible training workshops that, while still accessible to the academic community, target trainees that are seeking a job in the biotech/biomed sector, as well as employees of the diverse ecosystem of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the Life Sciences.
The project gathers the expertise of both academia and SME partners, putting together a 12-events program divided into two curricula (4 courses in the basic curriculum delivered twice, 4 courses in the advanced curriculum, for a total of 8 different courses), with offers ranging from introduction to programming and bioinformatics, to system administration and machine learning. The first of BioNT’s workshops, “A practical introduction to bioinformatics and RNA-seq using Galaxy'' will be delivered in early September, providing further insights into the challenges and practical aspects of providing training to SMEs and job seekers.
This project will foster the interaction and exchange between ELIXIR, especially the German, Spanish and Norwegian nodes connected to the BioNT project, and the academic and SME partners at BioNT. This would be achieved through a face-to-face meeting hosted by one of BioNT’s SME partners, HPCNow!, in Barcelona. During this meeting, we aim to work on two main goals:
- analyse and report the results from the bioinformatic training needs survey and the course delivery experience, and
- produce guidelines on SME-targeted training, also in light of the first workshop delivered by BioNT.
Both documents will be shared within the different communities attending the meeting, potentially reaching the training community worldwide. The event will be open to anyone from the involved ELIXIR nodes.