Developing Science Communication Skills in Early Career Scientists

Abstract

For two consecutive years, a workshop entitled Developing the Science of Science Communication has been offered as the Aquatic Sciences Meeting (2019) and Ocean Sciences Meeting (2020). The goal of these workshops was to provide training for early career scientists specifically related to verbal and visual communication skills that are sorely lacking in early career science curricula. Both qualitative and quantitative data was collected from 91 participants across the two workshops through pre‐ and postsurvey data. Participants overwhelmingly agreed that they (1) would recommend the workshop to others and (2) found the workshop content would be useful in their careers. Workshop participants had the opportunity to offer more feedback in response to several open‐ended questions related to the visual and verbal components of the workshop, each of which provided interesting feedback in terms of which session(s) were the most useful for different types of audiences and how to proceed in future workshops. The workshop hosts created a report with background information, survey data results, and recommendations moving forward. The full report can be found at: http://bit.ly/ECRworkshop.