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At the risk of provoking yet another return engagement of the perennial certification thread, I find myself once again needing to point out that obtaining a certificate is _not_ the same thing as becoming certified. A certificate merely indicates that you have paid the tuition and satisfied the minimum requirements for some course of study at some school. Becoming certified means that you have demonstrated to some independent examining organization that you possess competence in (if not mastery of) the the skills and practices of some discipline.
There are dozens (if not hundreds) of schools, colleges, and universities that will be happy to accept your tuition and issue a technical communications certificate of some sort. But so far there is no organization that has taken on the responsibility of establishing criteria, developing and administering an examination and practicum, and handling the recordkeeping and reporting burden associated with certifying the skills of technical writers.
As anyone who has followed the various certification threads on this list knows, there isn't much agreement among active practitioners regarding what general skill set (let alone what specific skills) are essential for a technical communicator/writer/illustrator/information designer, so it's not surprising that there has been little progress toward universal standards of practice.
-Fred Ridder
> Subject: Technical Writing Certification
> Date: Wed, 5 Aug 2009 08:27:35 -0400
> From: rmcandrews -at- csiu -dot- org
> To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
>
> I recall some earlier posts expressing an interest in pursuing TW
> certification. For those of you interested, this article suggests
> distance learning as an option.
>http://www.walletpop.com/college-finance/eim/article/new-government-prog
> rams-put-college/600496
Free Software Documentation Project Web Cast: Covers developing Table of
Contents, Context IDs, and Index, as well as Doc-To-Help
2009 tips, tricks, and best practices. http://www.doctohelp.com/SuperPages/Webcasts/
Help & Manual 5: The complete help authoring tool for individual
authors and teams. Professional power, intuitive interface. Write
once, publish to 8 formats. Multi-user authoring and version control! http://www.helpandmanual.com/
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