TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Re: STC certification: what's in it for tech writers?
Subject:Re: STC certification: what's in it for tech writers? From:Steven Jong <stevefjong -at- comcast -dot- net> To:mbaker -at- analecta -dot- com Date:Thu, 27 Oct 2011 13:12:21 -0400
Ah, but that is incorrect. There are a few items, which you've picked up on, that gently raise the bar of practice a bit. However, using your parlance, we're mostly certifying on base skills.
As a separate point, you wrote:
> All I can tell you is that, at the times in my career when I have been a hiring manager, certification in this particular basket of skills would not have interested me, and would perhaps have made me question whether the candidate was willing and able to adapt to my vision of what a tech writer should be.
One of the things we looked at when setting up the candidate instructions was the applicant who knows how to do something, but has not been asked to do it it on the job. We are assessing not just what you have done, but what you can do. This is why we allow submissions that are not just work samples. This covers practitioners working in jobs of limited scope.
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
-- Margaret Mead
On Oct 27, 2011, at 12:45 PM, mbaker -at- analecta -dot- com wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Oct 2011 12:23:46 -0400, Steven Jong wrote:
>
>> Mark Baker, looking at the basket of KSAs we're evaluating for the
>> certification program, suggests that we've gone about things backward
>> by creating the base certification first instead of more targeted
>> sub-certifications.
>
> No, I suggested that you had created a certification based on common skills (meaning frequently occurring, not shared by all), not base skills (absolute prerequisites for doing the job at all in any environment).
>
> I further suggested that while the items in your basket of common skills might all be common when measured individually, it would be less common for a particular technical writer to be exercising every skill in the basket on a particular job. (That's just what happens when you bundle probabilities: the probability of the set is always lower than the probability of the individual items.)
>
> This, I suggested, reduces the degree of correlation between what the certification tests for and what a hiring manager is looking for. Whether hiring managers will find sufficient correlation between what the certification covers and what they need, only time will tell.
Create and publish documentation through multiple channels with Doc-To-Help.
Choose your authoring formats and get any output you may need. Try
Doc-To-Help, now with MS SharePoint integration, free for 30-days. http://www.doctohelp.com
---
You are currently subscribed to TECHWR-L as archive -at- web -dot- techwr-l -dot- com -dot-
