Certification Issues

[Bill DuBay <bill_dubay -at- PHOENIX -dot- COM>]

Now that I have your attention, I would like to clarify a few matters.
The charge that I somehow was an STC plant to promote certification was just
the opposite of the real situation.
  I have been writing a series of articles, "Professionally Speaking," in the
Orange County (Calif) STC newsletter, TechniScribe, investigating exactly
what makes us and our work professional. The first article on certification
will be published in August in that newsletter.
  I was quite surprised to find a presentation by Larry Kunz at the Toronto
meeting, in which he announced the funding of the new study, the first since
the 4-year study done by the STC in 1982-86. (For background, be sure to read
Andy Malcolm's article, "On Technical Communicators" in the May 1987 STC
Journal. They not only did the survey of members and employers, but they had
a whole certification program planned, including enlistment of senior members
for administering the certification. More about that study later.)
  I was surprised, because I felt there had been a blackout on any public
discussion of this issue. In 10 years that I know of, only one article of
note was published in any of the publications. When I expressed the novel
idea that perhaps it would be well to inform people about the issues before
surveying them, I was told: "It is too explosive an issue. People are tired
of it. It will tear the society apart."
"What?" I said. " Where is the fire?"
 "On the Techwhirler. They will tear you apart."
"Oh," I said. "I'll have to look into that."

I for one do not think that an organization should ever back off from
informing members about an important  issue because it is controversial. To
the contrary, that's how issues generally are aired and sorted out. And you
certainly do not want to allow those who are the most emotional and voluble
to control the debate, nor do  you want to keep them out of it. I expressed
the belief that:

 1. The general STC membership is woefully uniformed of the issues
surrounding certifcation.
 2. The members of this list,  both pro and con,  are not much better off.

Much of the emotion and frustration is the result of
1. The issues not being clarified and
2. STC not taking leadership in clarifying the issues.

Duly warned, and with my asbestos gear in place, I gingerly tiptoed into the
list to prove my point: members are lacking information on the issues
surrounding certification. For the survey to be effective and meaningful,
they have to know the issues.

 My little survey asked the members of this list to express:
1. What they thought were the important issues in certification and
2. How they stood on those issues. I was not taking a poll of who was for and
who was against certification. I was attempting to delineate the issues on
both sides. If you do not think my summary of the issues was complete or
accurate, I apologize. The summary of the con issues was much less developed
than the pro issues because there was less need to elaborate. It was an
honest attempt to characterize ISSUES, not persons, as some people charged.

I hope to make time eventually to answer all the objections people raised.

  For starters, here is one. Someone asked how certification could contribute
to the preparation and development of skills. Look at it this way. Many of us
came in the back door of this profession from other trades not knowing much
about technical writing. We wallowed around a while, picking up new skills
from editors, STC groups, and occasional conferences and seminars. After a
while, some of us came up to speed. Many people never came up to speed.

 We had no objective standard by which we could measure our competence in
this field, nor did our employers. We wasted a lot of time and money with
this willy-nilly self-taught training.
If certification existed, whether we applied for it or not, there would have
been a measure we could have tested ourselves against, saving ourselves and
our employers a lot of time and money trying to figure the whole thing out by
oursleves. Certification is not directed at keeping anybody out of a
profession but on bringing them up to speed in the quickest time possible--as
determined by members of the profession, not by the academe nor by industry.

  The same goes for professional development. What is the proper course here?
How much time and effort should a person be investing in new and advanced
skills? Certification helps us all define those issues by establishing check
points in our careers. TC is a very dynamic and varied field, even for a
single career. Those check points give us support and encouragement as we
attempt to migrate from one path to another. If I want to jump over  into
editing and document management, what are the skills I am expected to have?
Where can I learn those skills, quickly? Those are the problems that
certification solves. It defines the skills of the profession. (You'll hear
me say that a few times.) It also points to the quickest paths to those
skills.

  To people who say that they are quite content in their existing situation
and that certification has nothing to offer them, I say, "How long are you
going to be content?" More important, "How long will your current employer
and industry as a whole be content?" Wouldn't it benefit us all to have a
process ready and waiting to help jump start a new direction in CW with new
skills and career opportunities? That's the promise that an effective CW
certification program could hold.


Bill DuBay
Technical Writer
Phoenix Technologies Ltd.
email: bill_dubay -at- phoenix -dot- com
(714)790-2049 FAX: (714)790-2001
http://www.phoenix.com

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