"What we wish we had learned in Graduate School" - a data management training roadmap for graduate students

Data management training for graduate students is a very important but often undervalued area of graduate school education. Many graduate students will go on and become professionals who are using, producing, and/or managing data that have tremendous benefits for both the research community and the society. However, our personal experiences as graduate students show that data lifecycle and data management training are not part of the core curriculum in graduate school. As Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Community Fellows, we understand that data management is a critical skill in earth science and we all wished we had an opportunity to integrate it from the beginning in our graduate school experience. To the issue of lack of formal data management training in graduate education, we convened a working session during 2020 ESIP Summer Meeting called What we wish we had learned in Graduate School? The session was initially planned as a working session for early career professionals to share resources and lessons learned during our own graduate school experiences. The session has sparked broad interests from the Earth science data community and attracted participants across different career stages and with different levels of expertise. The outcome of the session has been summarized as a roadmap that follows the DataONE data lifecycle. This roadmap projects the data lifecycle into the traditional graduate school timeline and highlights the benefits and resources of data management training for each component in the data lifecycle, which allows graduate students at different stages to understand the benefits of relevant training and learn at their own paces. This open roadmap is not intended to replace formal graduate training on data management but can be used to fill the gaps where formal graduate training does not cover.