New Study Published in Current: The Journal of Marine Education

Senior Researcher Travis Windleharth, along with foundry10 collaborators Lindsay Holladay Van Damme and Colin Katagiri, recently published an article on marine science career development.

foundry10 Senior Researcher Travis Windleharth recently published a new article in Current: The Journal of Marine Education. The article, “More than a Hobby: Marine Science Career Development through the Lens of Social Cognitive Career Theory,” was authored alongside foundry10 collaborators Lindsay Holladay Van Damme and Colin Katagiri.

As we enter the UN Decade of Ocean Science, there is high demand for a diverse marine science workforce. However, our understanding of what motivates people toward marine science careers is limited. To address this, we interviewed thirty ocean and marine science professionals across a range of jobs to identify a comprehensive series of factors that promote marine science career interest, as well as factors that impact the choice to move into this career space. We then mapped those factors to the social cognitive career theory (SCCT) model of career development and identified which were the positive drivers or negative barriers to choosing marine science as a career field.

From this study, we identified two themes that promote interest and career choice-making in the marine science field: participation in ocean recreation and access to informal learning experiences. Conversely, the major barriers for entry into the marine science field were education costs, including unpaid internships, and job competition and corresponding low pay in the field. Both of these barriers significantly impact underrepresented populations within this field as well. The article presents the the four themes (positive drivers and negative barriers) that emerged from the data along with a model of the findings.

“A clear finding from this study, which is consistent with work in other career fields that also experience high competition for jobs, unpaid work requirements, extended periods of underemployment, and low wages, is that these career paths tend to privilege people from families with the economic means to bridge these demands long enough to provide eventual access to the career,” said Windleharth. “I hope that program developers and researchers grapple with these systemic issues and orient their work toward removing these barriers.”

This article is now available to read online in Current: The Journal of Marine Education.