therapy and bodywork field currently trains/educates entry-level practitioners that should be done more to prepare them for employment? What are things that should be started by the massage therapy and bodywork field with how entry-level practitioners are trained/educated to better prepare them for employment? What are the ways in which the massage therapy and bodywork field currently train/educates entry-level practitioners that should be stopped to better prepare them for employment? Questions framed as suggested here would better elicit stakeholder responses focused on employment-related educational needs rather than practices. Responses for employment-related educational needs would better inform the field of therapist employee skills gaps experienced in industry and which perhaps limit massage career progression and opportunity. desire for such employment environment preparation, in addition to competency articulation efforts such as those by the Hospital Based Massage Therapy task force within ACIH. The task force recently released a set of competencies for massage therapy in hospital settings(25) based on a 2014 convenience sample survey of hospital-based massage therapy programs.(26) The top scoring health care-related comments highlight the likely agreement between massage therapy stakeholders and these sample efforts to align the massage field with health care. Our results support and add to prior findings that increased research and increasing research’s role in the massage field is important to the field’s positive progress.(2,9) Top scoring comments, such as employers should “support research efforts,” and schools should stop “ignoring evidence based research,” among others, highlight stakeholders value placement on research. Massage therapists are generally supportive of research in the field, but their comfort with, and skill at, accessing, assessing, utilizing, or contributing to research is relatively weak.(27,28) The research endeavor is complex with varying roles and skill sets needed to perform a continuum of aspects. For example, it is one thing for an individual to “consume” (i.e., access, read, understand, and apply) research; needed skills are less involved and potentially easier to master than those needed to design, collect, analyze, and disseminate research. Likewise, research participation is equally varied in its involvement, roles, and skill set, but can be intimidating at any level when the process and expectations are unknown. The exercise described here provided an opportunity for a relatively large number of massage therapy stakeholders to participate in a meaningful research endeavor as part of a fun and relaxed conference proceeding, in addition to removing (we hope) potentially intimidating or negative research perceptions. With this and other dissemination efforts, these research participants will have the opportunity to see the impact of their participation in research by seeing comments they either made themselves or added value points to. The fact that several top scoring comments focused on research importance to progress the field in a positive way may suggest, too, that our efforts to engage potentially reluctant massage therapy stakeholders with research were successful. Limitations and Future Steps The efforts described here have several limitations and generalizations from this data to other massage field populations should be made with caution. Best efforts were made to describe participants through the anonymous participant descriptor survey forum attendees were invited to complete via their smart devises. However, the extent to which survey respondents participated in the exercise or valued the top scoring comments is unknown. The data generated MUNK: MASSAGE EDUCATION STAKEHOLDER VIEWS 38 International Journal of Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork—Volume 12, Number 1, March 2019 This paper’s purpose is to provide a descriptive report for three aspects of the World Café-based exercise conducted in the 2017 Education Congress: 1) methods and rationale, 2) participant and participation descriptions, and 3) results. Only descriptive statistics have been applied to the quantitative data (value assignment for individual comments) and reported thus far. We anticipate an additional wealth of information to be gleaned by applying qualitative analysis methods to the collected data, and are in process of these analysis steps. Consideration of the top 45 scoring comments and their categorization provides general guidance about what massage education stakeholders feel is important for the massage field to move forward. Additional qualitative analysis may provide a more richly considered and clearer focused direction forward for the massage field’s unified efforts. CONCLUSION This is the first time the World Café method has been combined with components of speed dating to systematically collect, organize, consider, and disseminate the opinions of experienced and invested massage therapy stakeholders with regard to moving the field forward in a positive way. These efforts were collaborative between conference planners and volunteers, with a professional researcher working in an academic and research supportive environment allowing for the data cleaning, organization, analysis, and dissemination to be expedited relatively quickly.