R Certification

Background

We have seen an exponential increase in the demand of R among a large and variant set of audiences. People from various domains are keen to learn it and further improve their skills. This has created a supply and demand gap which is being filled by various teaching channels. While there is no dearth of the amount of R teaching material, both in-class and online, there is still arguably a shortage in skilled R users who possess quality skills in R. This shortage of qualified personnel and abundance of self-taught data scientists leads to confusion for employers as well as prospective employees who have the required skill-set but no way to differentiate themselves.

Proposal

There is no system today to certify qualified R Professionals. The R-Consortium, as the governing body for the R community, needs to step in as the neutral agency before another third-party comes in with a similar certification mechanism and tries to fill this gap. From a competitive perspective, SPSS and SAS already has a certification mechanism in place.

Moving Parts

We understand that there are multiple moving pieces and we have identified 3 main areas to bucket them –

1. Specialization

2. Training

3. Testing

4. Certification

We have also taken a stab at the sub categories under those buckets and the multiple paths that we can have for those functional areas that would allow the R Community to solve for the above mentioned challenges.

The likely path of certification to be taken in the initial cut

Key decisions to be made

The WG will work on the following elements regarding R certification:

1. Financials –

• Cost
  • Vendor Cost
  • Consortium Cost
  • Student Cost
• Profits

2. Marketing and Promotions 3. Testing

• Pass/Fail outcome
• Percentage – 0 to 100%
• Certification Levels

4. How long the certificate remains valid 5. Partnerships

• Training
• Testing
• Certifications

6. Curriculum –

• Generic
• Pharmacy
• Financial
• Visualizations
• Others

7. Phased Approach

• Identify the next couple of phases
• Phase 1
• Phase 2

Members

• David Smith (Microsoft)
• Jeremy Reynolds (Microsoft)
• Jonathan Cornelissen (Datacamp)
• Martijn Theuwissen (DataCamp)
• Mark Sellors (Mango Solution)
• Aimee Gott (Mango Solutions)
• Hadley Wickham (ISC liason, RStudio)
• Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel (RStudio)
• Dinesh Nirmal (IBM)
• Trishan de Lanerolle (Linux Foundation)
• MeharPratap Singh (ProCogia)

Minutes

2/1 Working Group Meeting

Attendees: Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel, Trishan de Lanerolle, Mehar Singh, JuanPablo Murillo, Mark Sellors

• Identified tech representatives in partner companies to collaborate on domain objective for certification.
• Discussed potential focuses of certification and certification seeker’s profile.
• Agreed on reaching out to connections at Linux Foundation for their expertise in technical certification logistics and setup.
• Updated deadline of domain objective completion to 2/28 and deadline of opening domain objective to R community in mid March.

2/13, 2/22, 3/1 Technical Representative Meetings - Domain Objective

Attendees: Richie Cotton, Aimee Gott, Garrett Grolemund, Mehar Singh, JuanPablo Murillo, Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel, Jeremy Reynolds, Nick Carchedi

• Developed a comprehensive content outline, which breaks R programming proficiency into several competency areas.
• Put together a list of packages/libraries to accompany content outline.
• Discussed and proposed a composite score in addition to a pass/fail final score. Composite score would take into account mastery within each competency area of the outline.