Australian researchers tells us about their bioinformatics training needs

Word cloud from responses to the prompt “I need to learn…”

Australian BioCommons and the National Bioinformatics Training Cooperative regularly surveys the life science community to find out what they need to learn, how they want to learn and if this is changing over time. The results of our 2023 survey are now available on Zenodo.

The survey shows that people want live training supported by self-paced materials. This was an exciting outcome for those of us in the training world as it’s a fantastic way to cement new skills and promote ongoing learning! 

As for the topics they need to learn, there is continued need for training on analysis of omics data, workflow management and a variety of tools, platforms and computational methods. Emerging topics from our 2021 survey (e.g. single cell RNAseq and Machine learning) remained popular in 2023. Spatial omics was revealed as an emerging training need reflecting the growing use of this method. The responses show that for trainees the focus is on what they need to achieve rather than how they need to achieve it highlighting the important role that subject matter experts and trainers have to play in shaping best practices. Australian BioCommons and our National Bioinformatics Training Cooperative are using these results to help us make sure that the training we offer is relevant.

We share the results of the survey in the spirit of openness and in the hope that it will spark conversations about the bioinformatics training needs of the life science community locally, nationally and internationally.

Keen to dig into the results? Read the report and download the data from Zenodo.