June 2025 CSCCE Monthly Newsletter

JUNE 2025 Newsletter

Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals: Training to build shared language, community, and impact

Five years ago, we designed a foundational training course for community managers in STEM – Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals. Since then, almost 400 STEM community managers from around the world have completed it, with our 16th general registration cohort starting in September. In this month’s newsletter we’re focusing on how CEF is making a difference across the STEM ecosystem, and sharing some new resources that are free to download, including a new guidebook on virtual networking!

We hope we’ll see you – or one of your team mates – in the virtual classroom soon!

A training that combines foundational ideas and peer-to-peer learning

CEF is an eight-week training course combining theory, practice, and peer-to-peer learning. It explores research and wisdom from a range of disciplines contextualized for community managers working in research institutions, professional societies, and organizations that support STEM infrastructure.

Each cohort of the training is capped at 25, ensuring that participants build meaningful connections with each other and get to hear first hand how others are approaching challenges and opportunities in their day-to-day work. At the end of the course, our graduates leave with a comprehensive view of their goals summarized in a final poster, and receive a digital badge to signal their new qualification to colleagues, community members, and future employers.

Proven impact – at three levels of scale

Last year, we completed our first medium-term evaluation of CEF, with a view to understanding how the training had impacted the individuals who took it, months to years after they graduated. We also considered the impact of the course on their communities and organizations, and on the STEM ecosystem more broadly.

What we found was an overwhelmingly positive impact on individuals – both in terms of their professional competence and their socioemotional wellbeing. Respondents to our survey also reported increases in multiple metrics related to community engagement, such as launching new programming and developing shared documentation, and they felt more connected and better placed within the wider ecosystem.

Join the next cohort!

Registration is now open for our next cohort of CEF, which will run on Mondays and Thursdays beginning Thursday, 4 September until Thursday, 23 October. If you have any questions about the training, including how it connects to our Community Manager Certification Program, please let us know by emailing training@cscce.org.

Also in this month’s newsletter:

Explore some of the resources we’ve published to support CEF
Find out more about the other multi-week trainings we’re offering this year: Nurturing Online Communities and Project Management for Scientists
Read about our community networking event and download our NEW guidebook on how to run one yourself

Already completed CEF? Continue your journey with certification!

CSCCE’s Community Manager Certification Program builds upon CEF to create a longer-form, multi-component, online program for STEM community managers. The program equips community managers and their organizations with necessary skills and frameworks to ground their work in a community-centric leadership approach – and to signal those qualifications to others. Enrollment is open year-round: Contact training@cscce.org to get started!

MORE INFORMATION

All about CEF

Register for CEF

Registration is now open for our Fall 2025 cohort of CEF (CEF25F), which will run on Mondays and Thursdays beginning Thursday, 4 September until Thursday, 23 October. You can register directly through Eventbrite, or if you would prefer to pay via invoice, please contact training@cscce.org.

A screenshot of an infographic highlighting the results of a medium-term evaluation of CEF.

Download our impact infographic

Designed to highlight some of the findings of our first longitudinal assessment of CEF, this infographic summarizes the impact of the course on individuals and their communities. Available as a free PDF download, this graphic can also be printed and shared!

Download

The cover of a report summarizing the findings of our medium-term evaluation of CEF

Read our medium-term evaluation

If you’d like to go deeper into the details of these findings, we also published a report that summarizes the data and research survey design. Our findings resoundingly confirm that CEF is serving its function well as CSCCE’s foundational training, and supports our mission to professionalize and institutionalize the role of the community engagement manager in STEM.

Download

A screenshot of the first page of our downloadable glossary of terms related to CEF.

Check out the CEF glossary of terms

A cornerstone of the CEF training is creating a shared language for STEM community managers to effectively communicate with each other, regardless of focus area or community function. On the CSCCE website, we maintain a growing glossary of terms, and recently curated all of the terms related to CEF into a downloadable PDF.

View the glossary | Download CEF terms

A quote from a CEF alum: "I am amazed at how much I've learner, how many ideas I've generated, how much more confident I feel about the value of my work and my expertise after such a short course with such a manageable workload and time commitment! It is NOT EASY to design a great course but CSCCE really knocked it out of the part with CEF."

Private cohorts, sponsorship, and discounts

Signing up for CEF as an individual is just one way of engaging with the training. We also offer private cohorts for large projects or geographic regions, sponsored places for organizations looking to support diverse participation, and a limited number of peer-supported discounts. Please get in touch to find out more about these options.

Find out more

An image collage of multiple copies of CSCCE's digital badges, which are all different colors and arranged in a rainbow-like pattern.

Explore additional multi-week training options from CSCCE

Registration is also open for our “Fall” cohorts of Nurturing Online Communities (NOC),and Project Management for Scientists (PMB). These courses offer domain specific professional development for STEM professionals in a range of roles: from community managers to program coordinators.

More information

Community news

Annual mid-year social recap

On Wednesday, 18 June 2025, we held our fifth curated networking event at our annual mid-year social. These events bring together 30-40 members of our Slack-based community of practice for an hour of one-on-one and small group chats, combining a “speed-networking” format with a community management mindset.

Find out more

New section of our virtual events guidebook: How to run our networking forum!

Over the years, we’ve had several requests from our members for the instructions for running a CSCCE-style networking forum. So, this year, we published a guidebook that describes how we do it – and includes access to our template docs, sheets, and forms! We’ve added this guidebook to our ongoing series on running virtual events to support community-building, all of which you can find on our website.

Download the new guide

JOBS AND OPPORTUNITIES

Senior Research Fellow in Bioinformatics and Open-Source Development (Bioconductor Developer Engagement)

Bioconductor is seeking a Senior Research Fellow with strong technical and open-source credentials to lead developer engagement, infrastructure innovation, and cross-community collaboration. This is a research-enabling leadership role focused on supporting and mentoring the global developer community, advancing interoperability and documentation infrastructure, and shaping inclusive, community-driven development practices. The successful candidate will also have the opportunity to contribute to technical research or tool development aligned with Bioconductor’s mission, depending on their interests. This position is based at the University of Limerick in Ireland.

Application deadline: 4 July 2025 | More information

Content in this section is provided by CSCCE clients and is included at the discretion of CSCCE. If you are interested in sharing employment opportunities, events, or other sponsored content in our monthly newsletter, please contact info@cscce.org. We reserve the right to not include content that does not complement the mission of our organization.

CSCCE

c/o Community Initiatives,
1000 Broadway Suite #480,
Oakland, CA, 94607, USA
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info@cscce.org

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