Initial draft of blog post for competencies paper

competencies-blog-post.md

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+# Identifying the Foundational Competencies of a Research Software Engineer
+
+_Jeremy Cohen, Florian Goth, et al._ (author list to sort out - if we need one at all?) 
+
+Only a little over a decade ago, the term Research Software Engineer (RSE) didn't exist. Now we find ourselves in a position where the term is increasingly widely accepted and research institutions are hiring RSEs to provide the vitally important skills that they need to support and undertake modern research. The landscape is, however, not uniform - in some countries there are now academic institutions with large groups of central, or distributed, RSEs working to support their research. In others, the term is only just becoming known. Nonetheless, the space is developing rapidly and we see a strong future for RSEs and the wider developing community of technical professionals in research.
+
+**What defines an RSE?**
+
+So what, or who, exactly is an RSE? Ask three people for a definition of RSE, and aside from the common words "software" and "research", you're likely to get three different answers! This is because the space in which RSEs work, and the work that they might do, is not always straightforward to define. RSE's inhabit a previously "hidden space" - the wide gap between the work of researchers in an academic institution and the work of professional service staff whose roles can include everything from finance and student administration to managers of enterprise computing infrastructure. While the work of an RSE, of course, includes software development, RSEs at one end of the scale representing this hidden space will have roles that look very much like that of a researcher or academic. At the other end of the scale, the role of an RSE will look very much like that of a professional software engineer working in an industry environment. While an RSE undoubtely writes software, their role is defined by a much wider range of skills, competencies and experience.
+
+Generic definitions of an RSE can be helpful - a common such definition generally highlights that "an RSE is someone who applies specialist software development skills to support and undertake research tasks". Nonetheless, while not incorrect, this definition masks a vast amount of complexity that we look into in great detail.
+
+**The foundational competencies of an RSE**
+
+Given this complicated and rapidly developing space, we set out to better understand and to identify the foundational competencies of a Research Software Engineer.
+
+In work initiated by Heidi Seibold and Florian Goth, a small team of co-organisers ran a workshop session, "Teaching and Learning Research Software Engineering", at the German RSE conference in Paderborn, Germany in February 2023 ([deRSE23](https://de-rse23.sciencesconf.org/)) which initiated the discussions to understand what exactly the competencies of an RSE are. This led to a lengthy process of detailed discussions over the course of around two years, with further workshops organised at the 2023 de-RSE Unconference in Jena, Germany ([un-deRSE23](https://un-derse23.sciencesconf.org/index)) and then at [deRSE24](https://go.uniwue.de/derse24) in Würzburg, Germany. While largely based around a core group of members of the German RSE community - [de-RSE](https://de-rse.org/en) - the group also had international input to ensure representation of the wider international perspective in resulting outputs.
+
+The length of time spent on this work and the very wide range of inputs and perspectives provided serves to highlight the inherent complexity in identifying the foundational competencies and responsibilities of a Research Software Engineer.
+
+**The paper**
+
+"Foundational Competencies and Responsibilities of a Research Software Engineer" works through the process of understanding what makes up the role of an RSE. It starts with some general background and terminology before highlighting what we see as the key values of an RSE - what they're trying to achieve in their role and the values that underpin that work. We then look at the competencies themselves, identified through extensive discussion and debate about what RSEs do and how they do it. These skills are grouped into those that relate directly to software, those that are more research related and those that are communication focused. We see these three areas as the core of what an RSE provides - specialist, high-quality software engineering knowledge, an understanding of the research environment (potentially working as a direct contributor to research itself), and the ability to communicate well and work highly effectively with researchers who may not have a computational background.
+
+After defining the core competencies, we look at career levels - what should RSEs be expected to know and at what level of detail at different career stages? A series of tables look at the previously defined competencies in the context of a set of career levels, defining the expected skills and level of knowledge for each. We also recognise that researchers and academics increasingly expect to be able to apply some technical skills themselves so we look at the RSE skills that researchers and academics might want to learn to support this.
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+Finally, focusing on the fact that RSEs can have a range of very different roles, we look at RSE specialisations, highlighting a number of different roles that RSEs might hold that involve the application of specialist knowldge in related areas. This includes domain-specific RSEs, who have, and use, specialist research domain knowledge, in addition to technical skills. We also describe a number of other technical specialisations including data, infrastructure, High Performance Computing and Machine Learning-focused RSEs.
+
+**Find out more, join the discussion**
+
+A pre-print of our paper, which you can find on [arXiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.11457) has been adopted as an official position paper of [de-RSE](https://de-rse.org/en). As part of our aim to further develop the discussion on this work, take our findings to a wider audience and develop further research in this area, we are also exploring journal publication options for the final version of the paper. If you'd like to join our group and participate in the discussions and future work, get in touch with ....