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Categorization of Competencies
The forum groups a well-defined set of competencies into a skill. A skill is defined as a set of learning outcomes and relevant metadata that clearly defines what a practitioner should be able to do to be said to possess that skill. The skills are organized in a tree structure from a coarse-grained representation (corresponding to the tree branches) to a fine-grained representation mapped onto the tree leaves. On the leaf level, a skill is orthogonal to other skills -- their narrowed scope means they intentionally can be taught in sessions ranging from a 1.5-hour lecture up to a 4-hour workshop. It may cover technology-specific knowledge such as the skill "USE1.1-B Command Line Interface" for Linux basics or the skill "K4.2-B SLURM Workload manager" that describes how a cluster manages user jobs. We believe this granularity allows the learning practitioners to cherry-pick skills relevant to their circumstances, and lecturers and examiners to prepare modular training sessions with well-defined content while still achieving comparable training outcomes for a varied range of practitioners’ backgrounds.
As the tree serves the purpose of organizing the skills, cross-linking between skills belonging to different branches is allowed. This important property allows for the reuse of the skill definitions and eases the navigation of the tree according to the semantics. As a consequence, users will be able to browse and select the suitable training sessions provided by the institutions and organisations participating in the Certification Program through adopting the HPCCF skill tree and labeling their course offers accordingly.