The SciLifeLab Training Portal launches the Training Catalogue and Training Preparation Resources

As part of ongoing work to consolidate and increase access to the cutting-edge training available at SciLifeLab, the SciLifeLab Training Portal has recently released the SciLifeLab Training Catalogue and a streamlined overview of Training Preparation Resources.

An overview of available training

There has been a need to provide incoming postdocs, PhD students, researchers, and group leaders with a complete overview of recurring training that happens through the infrastructure. Approximately 60 courses are held on a regular basis, but until now there hasn’t been a public collection of what SciLifeLab offers. 

The SciLifeLab Training Catalogue is a community resource where course coordinators and training representatives add their SciLifeLab training to contribute to mapping and showcasing the valuable learning opportunities to the wider community.

Systems developer Harshita Gupta is part of the team making these resources possible. She is particularly excited about the new feature of registering interest in Training Catalogue courses; “If the training you want for any listed course is not scheduled yet, you can tell us you are interested, and we will send you an email as soon as a new date is out. Before this, the portal could only ask you to come back and check again later. Now you tell us once, and we come to you. You do not even need an account, just an email address. 

We even released the new design which is what people will see first. The homepage now starts with a search, and every training is shown as a card with the date, the format and the last day to apply on it, so you can see what is coming without opening each page. But the notification feature is the part I like most, because it makes the portal useful even when there is nothing to sign up for yet.”

An overview of community resources

Another feature of this release is an easy-to-navigate overview of the resources and knowledge for holding successful training at SciLifeLab. On the Training Portal there is now information on recommended timelines, how to apply for computational teaching resources like Jupyter Notebooks, course certificate apps, and best practices for FAIR materials all in one place. 

These pages are continuously updated, so the community is encouraged to get in touch with the SciLifeLab Training Hub to connect additional resources with others.

A project with ties to the EU Training community

The SciLifeLab Training Portal began by building on the European Training eSupport Service (TeSS), the open source training platform from ELIXIR. Since 2024, the Training Hub’s development team has worked hard to grow and deliver an Open Source solution tailored to the SciLifeLab research landscape.

Says Gupta, “We adapted [the Portal] for the life science community in Sweden, and we have developed it in our own direction since then. Our training pages are published in a standard format that other portals can read, so training listed with us can also be found outside our own site. What we would like next is a proper exchange with the European TeSS portal, so that a course listed here can also be found by someone searching there, without anyone having to enter it twice.

The collaboration we ask for most is with the other groups who run training in Sweden. We would like them to put their courses in our Training Catalogue. The portal is open to anyone who runs training for this community, and we would really like it to be there.”

In 2026 the Training Portal has averaged almost 3000 views monthly, and the Training Hub continues to develop the Portal to address the needs of our community. “We have tried to make it as easy as possible to announce a course or workshop across Sweden” says Kristen Schroeder, Scientific Training Officer at the Training Hub. “In the Training Strategy Survey we heard that time is a scarce resource for most people. So once your training is in the catalogue, it takes only a few clicks for an upcoming instance of a course to be announced on the Portal, the SciLifeLab Newsletter, the SciLifeLab Slack, and beyond.”

“SciLifeLab sees training as a strategic driver of excellence in life science research. These new portal features make it easier for learners to engage with relevant training and enable trainers to organise, promote, and deliver courses with greater impact and less energy.”, says Jessica Lindvall, Head of Training Hub. She continues, “As training and learning is something we all are invested in, we depend on ongoing community input. Therefore the Training Hub would love to hear back from you regarding any feedback.”