Badged up for success: Digital badges enable graduate students to become confident communicators via real-world opportunities and to document their skills for employers

TL;DR

Digital badges help graduate students gain confidence in science communication and showcase their skills to employers.

Contribution

Digital badges are introduced as a novel tool to document and encourage science communication skills among graduate students.

Findings

18 interns earned a beginner badge in two years.

86% of respondents believed digital badges would be valuable in job searches.

92% reported increased confidence in communicating their research.

Abstract

In January 2023, the South Carolina Science Writing Initiative for Trainees (SC-SWIFT), an internship in the College of Graduate Studies at the Medical University of South Carolina, began offering tiered digital badges in science communications. The badges’ purpose was to encourage graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to engage in extracurricular science writing opportunities available through SC-SWIFT and to document acquired communications skills for employers. The badges have been well received, with 18 interns earning the beginner badge in the first two years of the program. In March 2025, SC-SWIFT queried 25 interns who had earned a beginner badge or completed half the requirements for doing so in 2023–2024 to gauge how important they considered the badges to their engagement in science communications and how valuable they would be in a job search. All 14 respondents found the badges important in engaging them in science communications, and 86% either strongly agreed or agreed that digital badges would be an asset when job searching. Eleven of 12 respondents (92%) thought that their confidence in telling their own research story had increased. These initial results suggest that digital badges could be useful tools for documenting science communications skills acquired during extracurricular, experiential learning.

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