By 8am this morning we were in the classroom, learning with Hollie Booth and Muhammad Ichsan from WCS again. Today our focus was on conservation careers, and our guest speakers shared their career stories and gave advice on the skills and experiences that can be useful in this field. Then we discussed tips and tricks to arrange our curriculum vitae. We learned the importance of tailoring our CV to the job, and how to communicate our achievements in addition to our education and employment history.

Learning about conservation careers with WCS

This afternoon we learned about communications, and how to create powerful messages that resonate with our target audience. Public opinion is something that is difficult to change, and so we need a step by step approach to change unsustainable behaviours. We need to examine why people are not aware, then work to raise awareness and comprehension, until we convince people to take action. We learned how to create a conservation message using elements of loss, love, need and action. I found it interesting to learn about different audiences, for example, did you know that messages containing incorporating love and action can be useful to change public opinion, whereas need and action are more suitable for policymakers.

Human behaviour is one of the most important things you should understand if you want to make a powerful conservation message. We can learn from the marketing industry how to share information and encourage people’s awareness. We must know what behaviour changes we hope to achieve, and must recognise that proving information does not equal behaviour change. It was interesting to learn how issues such as layout, colours and fonts are important considerations when creating conservation messages, and that conservation is about people just as much as it is about wildlife.

We ended the day by taking a boat to Kelor Island to watch the sunset while discussing how to apply these communication tips to our week 1 video diary.