Key Findings and Recommendations

The need for geoscientists to address societal problems is expanding, and geoscience employment is changing both in scope and scale, requiring new skills and competencies. At the same time, graduate enrollments in the geosciences have decreased significantly for the first time in four decades (46.6% since 2018), a trend that started before the pandemic (~2011); graduate degrees have also plummeted (master’s 32.3%; doctorate: 48.4%). With ongoing shortages of qualified geoscientists, many of those positions are being filled by non-geoscientists, currently constituting ~22% of the geoscience workforce. There is an immediate overall need for geoscience graduate programs to increase enrollments and degrees granted. Geosciences also needs to move toward a more diverse student body and workforce. A geoscience profession that is responsive across society requires that programs recognize the need for a combination of cultural change, effective mentoring, the shifting of educational and research topics to stay relevant, and better career preparation for students.

Most importantly, geoscience education and research must change to meet the needs of graduate students so they can be successful in their future careers. Programs need to be student focused and promote the development of skills and competencies students need for a wide variety of careers. There is a mismatch between graduate geoscience education and research in Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and those skills and competencies that graduates will need in future careers in these fields. The private sector is growing rapidly in some areas of the geosciences and shrinking in others, so that programs often need to adapt and realize that collaboration across the geosciences is both beneficial for students and the health of geoscience departments. Most geoscience graduate programs focus on preparing students for academic positions in their discipline, yet these positions represent only a small fraction of the total geoscience workforce (8%). Only about half of geoscience doctoral students end up in academia, and many of those in academic positions are primarily teaching focused.

The combined academic and employer community has established a consensus on the skills and competencies that need to be developed to prepare graduates for meaningful employment across most employment sectors, including academia. These range from problem solving, critical thinking, geoscientific and systems thinking, and communication to a wide variety of audiences — to quantitative and computational skills, data management and analytics, geostatistics and geospatial reasoning, among other technical skills. Teamwork and collaboration, leadership, communication skills, social dynamics, interpersonal skills, project and program management, business skills, and ethics are all critical. Graduate students still need expertise in core areas, but they also need to recognize the broader impacts of their research. Personal traits such as the ability to learn, a growth mindset, emotional intelligence, and having diverse and adaptable skills set are critical to success. Students going into academia also need to learn how to teach and mentor students and train their students in these skills. The participating employers identified observed skill gaps in many finishing graduate students, most notably that many graduating students have trouble defining problems that need solving, and identifying and applying possible solutions, though most can solve problems that they are given.

Conducting research is considered an important skill, and many fundamental competencies are enmeshed in doing research, such as critical thinking and problem solving, oral and written communication, knowing the current and future trends in the relevant scientific literature, coding and other technical skills, and project management. Employers also value high-level graduate coursework for helping students develop new skills and giving them practice in defining and solving problems, applying solutions, and improving written and oral communication skills. The general menu of skills needed in master’s and doctoral graduates are the same, but the levels of competency differ both by degree and with the type of employment. Over the four-year period from 2018 to 2022, rapid advances in information and computational technology led to striking changes in expectations — what employers in 2018 had predicted would be important in 5 to 10 years have become nearly essential today, particularly in terms of the expectations for skills in data management and data analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and computer programing and coding.

Department heads, chairs and graduate program directors identified ways each of the recommended skills and competencies could be developed while conducting research, through graduate courses and co-curricular activities. Students can develop some skills as the natural outcome of their specific research, including time and project management skills, and the effective communication of broader impacts, especially to wider audiences. Students need to explicitly develop a range of skills and competencies, and recognize those competencies that they have. Many of the recommended skills — as an example, written and verbal communication - can be integrated into existing graduate coursework. Stand-alone courses within or external to the department (including online courses) can help students develop skills such as data analytics, computer programming, and business skills. Courses also should focus on problem solving, teamwork, and aspects of project management. Co-curricular activities, ranging from clubs and departmental outreach programs, professional organization activities, international experiences, internships and interactions with alumni and employers, short courses, online courses, and targeted professional development courses, all provide excellent ways for students to gain skills not readily attainable through their research or formal curricula.

A key recommendation for all graduate programs is to have their students develop Individual Development Plans (IDPs) early in their academic careers, in conjunction with their advisor and other mentors. IDPs allow students to explore their own skills and career aspirations, identify those skills they need to develop, and lay out a roadmap for achieving their goals. IDPs are useful for more than just developing skills needed for a specific career path. They also help provide more structure to advising and mentoring conversations, to help keep students on track, and they help guide students in their progression through their degree programs to completion. One recommendation was to consider offering an onboarding experience or course for all new graduate students, where they develop an IDP. Such a group activity would also help programs develop student cohorts, and could cover other pertinent topics such as ethics in science, leadership, time management, emotional intelligence, the professional importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and other kinds of professional development.

Effective and successful mentoring is critical to geoscience graduate student success and should not be ad hoc. Students benefit from receiving mentoring from more than one individual, and from others in addition to their advisor and thesis and dissertation committee members. Training faculty in best practices for mentoring, and providing incentives for improving mentoring practices, may be needed.

Geoscience graduate programs need to define the learning outcomes that they expect all master’s and all doctoral students to achieve while in their programs. These expectations and how to obtain them need to be clearly communicated to graduate students. All coursework, whether required or not, should list expected learning outcomes. Some faculty will find it easier to incorporate key skills into their existing classes, while others may prefer to team-teach with faculty who have different, complementary skillsets, including faculty in other departments. Information on external professional development and co-curricular opportunities should be compiled and made readily available to graduate students. Department websites should post lists of the recommended skills and competencies discussed in the sections below, with links to this report. Toward helping students develop individual development plans (IDPs), departmental websites should include descriptions of their IDP requirement and how they are developed, with links to external resources on IDPs, sample IDP forms, and/or their own versions.

Departments should seek to leverage input from their alumni and the employers of their master’s and doctoral graduates, as both can actively assist graduate programs in meeting these challenges. Many faculty are unaware of the dynamic changes occurring in the geoscience workplace and what skills are most needed by graduate students when they have completed their degrees.

Alumni and employers can provide important career awareness testimony. They should visit departments and give talks about their careers and the skills they needed for success. Alumni and employers can also provide mentorship to students, serve on thesis/dissertation committees, and help with student professional development in terms of building attractive resumes, applying and interviewing for positions, and professional networking. They can serve on program or departmental advisory boards and can teach or co-teach courses. Employers can also provide internships, externships, other kinds of financial support, access to large geoscience datasets, and/or real-world problem case studies for students to work on in classes.

Professional societies should work with their membership to support graduate geoscience programs by developing short courses and/or workshops targeting key recommended skills, and setting up certification or accreditation programs that students can use to formally document their competencies. This includes expanding mentoring opportunities for graduate students through support of professional networking, providing resources for making departmental and curricular changes, and helping to disseminate the results of this initiative to ensure that their members are aware of this report.

Funding agencies can influence the direction of graduate education and training by establishing explicit requirements for graduate student training and mentoring as conditions of support, as recently added by NSF in 2023, and by providing financial support to departments (as appropriate) in support of implementing changes to graduate programs.

Transformative change to graduate programs is needed, but faculty need to be convinced of this need and be incentivized to make change. It is important to recognize that most faculty are already overloaded with responsibilities and requirements and generally do not have the bandwidth to take on additional work. Many faculty, like their students, are struggling with mental health, motivation and work/life balance issues related to the COVID‑19 pandemic. They may need further professional development training, as well as other incentives that decrease their other time commitments. They need to understand that, in the end, these changes will benefit them as well as students and programs.

Faculty incentives and rewards for excellence in teaching, mentoring, student professional development, developing new courses, integrating key skills into existing courses, and working on curricular changes all depend on individual situations. This can range from monetary achievement awards, merit raises or bonuses, teaching releases, summer support, extra teaching credit and other ways of creating flexibility in faculty workloads. Making these considerations part of yearly merit reviews and promotion decisions will emphasize their importance.

The primary factors departments use to measure success are the employment of their finishing graduate students and degree completion, followed by publications and research for doctorates. Thus, developing the skills and competencies necessary for future success and mentoring students through their degree to completion is the primary motivator for change to graduate geoscience programs. A department’s success depends on this change.

Other effective approaches are to leverage the external pressures. The impacts of low geoscience graduate enrollment and retention issues on financial and upper administration support, and the importance of student success and program rankings, are some of the factors that can be used to encourage change. The threat of department closures or shrinking departments is real and happening in some geoscience fields, while some specialty areas, such as data analytics and the application of AI, are experiencing dramatic growth in student interest and job opportunities. Administration and faculty need to be made aware of these changes and develop plans to evolve programs toward success.

Those departments that reported progress on action plans that they developed as part of our 2019 Summit highlighted a variety of successes (summarized in Section 7: Fostering Change in Academic Communities: Case Studies). The introduction and use of IDPs was the most successful, followed by the integration of many key skills into courses, developing new courses, and even developing a cross-college certificate program. The advice they provided ranged from taking things slow and starting with changes that had minimal impact on faculty, to engaging the whole faculty in open debate and discussion of program goals and student learning outcomes.

Culture change in departments is difficult, but the long-term health of the geoscience profession demands change. Graduate students are entering a wide variety of professions and careers that are different than in the past. They will need both a larger and different menu of skills and competencies to be successful in the future workforce. This report provides a roadmap for change and is intended as a resource for department heads and chairs, graduate program directors, faculty, students, alumni, employers, professional societies, and funding organizations interested in shaping the future of graduate geoscience education.

Recommendations

Transformative changes in graduate geoscience education are needed to ensure the long-term health of geoscience graduate programs and professions and to produce geoscientists with the skills and competencies needed to address global societal challenges.

Geoscience employers and the academic community have achieved consensus on the portfolio of critical skills and competencies needed by Master’s and Doctoral graduates in Earth, Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences to lead successful, fulfilling careers. These should be broadly disseminated and used to guide graduate students, faculty, and departments.

Graduate education should encompass these skills and competencies through research, courses and co-curricular activities, and students should be encouraged to develop them, with the depth dependent on their degree and career goals.
Graduate students need to take ownership of developing these skills and competencies during their graduate education.
Graduate students should have increased practice in problem identification and approaches to finding solutions, as well as solving problems, in courses and their research.
Skills related to data analytics, coding, and computer programming should be embedded in theses and dissertations and coursework.
Scientific communication skills — verbal and written — should be honed for both scientific and more diverse audiences.
Graduate students should prepare “elevator speeches” — a brief statement of what they have accomplished in their research and why it is significant — that they practice and revise throughout their graduate career.
Graduate students need to develop a leadership and innovation mindset as they pursue their education.
Research is the central property of a graduate program and should be treated as both an intellectual and pedagogical construct.
Graduate supervisors need to encourage their students to broaden their skillsets through coursework and co-curricular activities.
Geoscience graduate programs should consider ensuring that all doctoral students gain experience in teaching.

Students should be required to develop Individual Development Plans (IDPs) early in their academic career, in conjunction with their advisor and other mentors. These plans provide structure to advising, a roadmap for achieving student goals, and help keep students on track towards completion of their degree.

Departments should consider requiring that faculty to provide a mentorship plan in order to admit students into the graduate program, and for all graduate students to have a mentoring plan.
Discussion around mental health and work/life balance should be normalized.

Department heads/chairs, and graduate program directors must take leadership roles in creating and incentivizing change. It requires convincing faculty and upper administration that there is a need for change and providing a proposed path to doing so.

Department heads, chairs and graduate program directors should leverage external pressures to convince faculty of the need for change, such as their student legacy, decreasing enrollments, lack of diversity, rankings, financial support, expanding geoscience careers, and changes in the nature of the geosciences.
Graduate program and departmental culture needs to become more inclusive and supportive of diversity in demographics, thought, and career paths.
Departments should market geoscience graduate degrees as a means of developing the knowledge, skills and competencies needed to solve societal issues and to increase diversity and overall enrollment.
Departments need to develop program-wide student learning outcomes for their master’s and doctoral students, and individual faculty should establish learning outcomes for their graduate courses. Graduate students should be made aware of these learning outcomes and receive guidance on where they can be obtained both within and external to the department.
Graduate education needs to be student focused, using the broad spectrum of identified skills and competency opportunities available through research, coursework, and co-curricular activities to meet educational and career goals.
Departments should consider offering an onboarding course or experience for all new graduate students to form a cohort, develop Individual Development Plans, and be introduced to ethics in science, leadership, time management, the importance of emotional intelligence and of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice.
Departments should take advantage of the experience and advice of colleagues who have begun to make efforts toward transformative change their graduate programs.
Faculty should have the benefit of further training and support in effective mentoring, teaching, and supervising their graduate students to provide an education that results in successful students.

Heads/Chairs, faculty, employers, alumni and professional societies need to communicate, collaborate and offer opportunities for graduate students to successfully develop these skills and competencies.

Alumni and employers should consider and be encouraged to participate in the graduate education effort through giving lectures on careers, mentoring, providing help with professional development, serving on master’s and doctoral committees, and offering internships, externships, datasets and/or financial support.
Departments should consider establishing external advisory councils or boards that meet annually or biannually to provide advice on their graduate programs.

Professional geoscience societies should be proactive in disseminating the results of this initiative, including a link to this document, and post a list of resources the society offers to support preparation of graduate students. They should consider offering inexpensive short courses or workshops focused on these desired skills, setting up certification programs, and increasing mentoring opportunities.

Funding agencies should establish explicit requirements for the inclusion of graduate student support in awarded grants, such as requiring plans for student mentorship and career development using IDPs. As well, funding agencies should find ways to provide support for departments seeking to implement changes to their graduate programs.