Building HPC Learning Pathways: Understanding our Community

Demand for specialist High Performance Computing (HPC) skills is growing rapidly. To support this demand, we need to improve the opportunities for skills development. Existing approaches to HPC training often involve growing skills and experience over a number of years of on-the-job training. However, we already face a skills shortage that can't be addressed with current training provisions. Clear and well-structured "training pathways" can offer an important means of helping learners to understand what they need to learn, in what order, so that they can develop the skills that they need. Development of such pathways requires a clearer understanding of the learning aims of members of the HPC community. In this paper, we present information gathered at a BoF session run during the SC23 supercomputing conference. This information provides insight into the current aims and perspectives of community members in relation to HPC skills.