Abstract: With the shortening of knowledge updating cycle, lifelong learning becomes necessary. As a group of scientists and technicians who pursue the discovery of scientific knowledge, their continuing education has its particularity. At present, there are more studies on continuing education in medicine and engineering at home and abroad, but less on other science researchers. In order to understand the needs of science workers in terms of continuing education and its effective training modes, an online survey was conducted from April to June 2014 to investigate their training needs, focusing on the methods, contents, approaches and other assistance they expected from training. 872 pieces of data were collected, of which 7 were duplicated and 865 were valid. The survey results show that the most needed contents include frontier professional knowledge, team management theory, research projects and fund management knowledge, while the most recognized training methods include learning through work, academic seminars, visits and so on. People with different professional titles have different tendencies. The dataset enables us to analyze the training content and mode needed by scientists in different positions and of varied titles.