The development and application of bioinformatics core competencies to improve bioinformatics training and education

Bioinformatics is recognized as part of the essential knowledge base of numerous career paths in biomedical research and healthcare. However, there is little agreement in the field over what that knowledge entails or how best to provide it. These disagreements are compounded by the wide range of populations in need of bioinformatics training, with divergent prior backgrounds and intended application areas. The Curriculum Task Force of the International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB) Education Committee has sought to provide a framework for training needs and curricula in terms of a set of bioinformatics core competencies that cut across many user personas and training programs. The initial competencies developed based on surveys of employers and training programs have since been refined through a multiyear process of community engagement. This report describes the current status of the competencies and presents a series of use cases illustrating how they are being applied in diverse training contexts. These use cases are intended to demonstrate how others can make use of the competencies and engage in the process of their continuing refinement and application. The report concludes with a consideration of remaining challenges and future plans.Author summary: As data size and complexity increase in life science research, so the need for bioinformatics training has increased. This training is required across a wide variety of audiences, but varies in the level of detail and content that needs to be delivered. A scientist wishing to use some bioinformatics tools to analyse their specific dataset will require different competencies than one that provides support in a bioinformatics services environment. The Curriculum Task Force of the International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB) Education Committee has attempted to address this by developing a set of bioinformatics core competencies and mapping these to ten different user profiles across the spectrum of potential trainees. Here we present the final iteration of the competencies and some examples to demonstrate how they have been used to drive bioinformatics curriculum development and training in different settings.