Against (Just) Training
For research communications, it's a Band-Aid on a chainsaw wound.
You—the researcher and disciplinary expert—also want to become an effective public expert, a role which requires a very different set of skills and competencies. So, as you take your first steps toward achieving this goal, you will probably at some point say something like the following:
“I need training. Can I get some training?”
Training as in: Media training. Messaging training. Storytelling training. On-camera training. Presentation training.
All the trainings. So many trainings. Everyone wants training.
Because training—as in, hiring professional trainers to come in and train you in dedicated training sessions—is how you acquire the skills and competencies you need to be a public expert, isn’t it?
No. No, it isn’t.
This news is bewildering and perhaps even shocking, especially if you’re a professional communications trainer, and especially if you’re a manager in a research organization who has been hiring professional communications trainers because your organization’s researchers have less than stellar communications skills.
But I’ve been working with researchers for over 25 years and hired countless trainers to give countless trainings (as well as, years ago, giving many myself) and…no.
At best, training is just a very small part of how you become an effective public expert.
Why do I say these terrible things? Three reasons, gleaned from bitter experience:
1. Training is worthless if you’re not already working to become a (better) public expert.
Have you ever wanted to do something new for a while (like get into photography) and finally bought something expensive (like a fancy camera) as the motivation to actually do it? Communications training works about as well—if you’re not already communicating with the public.
Becoming a competent public expert from a standing start takes most researchers a minimum of a year—a year of frequent opportunities to learn your craft, feedback that both supports and challenges you, and real incentives for success and failure. On its own, training isn’t catalytic; dedicated training sessions are too short to inculcate anything useful. And if the training can’t be embedded in your ongoing public expert practice—a practice in which you regularly use, adapt and make your own what you learn in training—the training won’t stick.
2. Training isn’t experiential learning. Becoming a public expert is all about experiential learning.
Training consists of learning about concepts and then acting them out periodically during the day of training in a few controlled exercises with a group of your colleagues, all of whom speak your language. That experience doesn’t teach you a million essential skills you need as a public expert—such as how to tell good content ideas vs. bad ones, or when your talk has tipped over the line of having too much detail, or what your best response options are to a mistake you’ve made in social.
The only way to learn these things—and all the other essential aspects of being a public expert—is through experiential learning: by actually translating your expertise into something useful for non-specialists and using the feedback you get to make the next piece of content even more useful to them. You can learn about them in theory; but you cannot learn them that way.
Now, if you’re working under the guidance of a) a mentor who’s been through what you’re going through, and/or b) a communications expert who understands your research and what you want to accomplish in your public outreach, you’re going to progress much faster. But the work is the best teacher.
3. There’s nothing on the line in training.
A hanging concentrates the mind wonderfully. Giving a talk in front of your colleagues doesn’t push you like giving the same talk to people who can fund you for the next three years—or take all your funding away. You wouldn’t dare give the second group anything resembling the first talk. So why give the first talk at all?
As quickly as you can, you must put yourself into situations that expose you the public expert to real incentives, high stakes and live fire. There are no better accelerants to your learning curve.
Bottom Line: Training is Not Transformation
So why do so many research organizations keep defaulting to training ?
In part, the industry of science communication is structured around training instead of longer, more strategic advisory work.
In larger part, training allows organizations to say they offered a solution to a problem without taking their researchers away from their day jobs for too long.
It’s a gestural, bureaucratic fix for a much bigger need—a Band-Aid on a chainsaw wound.
Becoming a public expert is transformative—for your career, for your organization and its strategic goals. But being transformative requires a transformation, one in which you learn how to inhabit the role of public expert in alignment with your professional identity as a researcher and disciplinary expert.
That transformation takes courage, commitment and time. Training might be a small part of that process. But it is never a catalyst or a substitute for it.