For almost two decades now, students have had an opportunity at Imperial College to practise modern data management techniques using two tools, the Janus-like computational portal or ELN, where one face links to high performance facilities and the other face to data publication repositories. Students and researchers alike have learnt about the importance of persistent identifiers, increasingly used in future-facing knowledge graphs and which in turn will be a central feature of developments in AI/ML. More hidden from view is perhaps the increasingly sophisticated metadata associated with data publications, but which nevertheless allows a researcher's work to be readily found and re-used by others. As the repositories and their embedded data and metadata workflows become further enriched, one might anticipate a much wider diversity of data will be added, including more forms of spectroscopy and other instrumental methods. As both students and researchers develop their portfolio of what are referred to as "works" by ORCID, we might imagine their future career could be influenced not only by their published journal works, but by their registered activities in data publication.