Facing one of its biggest challenges, the Natural History Museum London (NHM) will digitise 20 million of its natural history specimens in the next five years. As a result of this, a significant volume of data will be produced in need for curation. As large institutions face the challenges of digital science it is imperative that scientific staff have the capacity to understand, manage and hand-over data in an efficient and future-proof way.

We will describe the first steps of a long-term plan to introduce a continuous data training scheme in support of the activities of NHM digital collections programme. In a ongoing 9-month project NHM will benchmark current data skills across scientific departments, assess existing digital skills and competencies job requirements, and improve the scientists’ capacity to wrangle biodiversity data. We will present the key milestones of the project as well as preliminary results.