Building the Research Innovation Workforce: Challenges and Recommendations from a Virtual Workshop to Advance the Research Computing Community

The workforce for research computing, cyberinfrastructure, and data analytics is a complex global ecosystem comprised of workers across academia, national laboratories, and industry. To explore the underlying factors that affect the growth and vitality of this workforce ecosystem, we conducted an NSF funded virtual workshop during the third quarter of 2020 attended by 100 participants. The workshop identified challenges affecting the workforce pipeline and ecosystem and generated recommendations to help address these challenges. This paper provides a summary of the workshop, challenges, and recommendations.