Support for the Independent Consultant or Contractor
By Elizabeth (Bette) Frick | Associate Fellow
This column explores the joys and challenges of managing your own technical communication business. Please share your experience and ideas. Contact Bette Frick at efrick@textdoctor.com.
A former student emailed that she had enrolled in a certification course after a year of unemployment. I congratulated her but wondered privately why it had her taken so long. Was it fear, or cost, or the sense that she knew enough already?
May be I see value in certification because I’m an official “Learner,” according to my Strengths Finder 2.0 assessment: “You love to learn—you will always be drawn to the process of learning. The process, more than the content or the result, is especially exciting for you. You are energized by the steady and deliberate journey from ignorance to competence.”
With a graduate degree that is 22 years old, I know that I need to renew my learning to demonstrate competency and proficiency. I love learning at conferences like the STC Summit and others, but this path is eclectic, unstructured, and rarely documented. Therefore, I have recently sought certification for educational and strategic reasons because I’ve added medical editing to my services as a corporate trainer. For me, training and medical editing enhance each other and provide balance, variety, and relative security in a risky economy.
To gain credibility for my editing services, I joined AMWA (American Medical Writers Association) and enrolled in their certification process (eight courses), which I will complete soon. I am also a candidate for the BELS examination (Board of Editors in the Life Sciences). Both certification processes are rigorous, requiring extensive study and humbling tests on subjects like statistics and numbers, which I, an English major, have carefully avoided throughout my career.
There are at least three forms of professional certification based on examination, course completion, or portfolio review. I’m involved in the first two methods, and I look forward to the new STC offering of a portfolio-based certification for six core competency areas of practice (user analysis, document design, project management, authoring, delivery, and quality assurance). According to Steven Jong, chair of the certification committee implementing STC certification, “Certification raises professional standards, increases respect, and reduces employers’ risk in hiring decisions, since hiring the wrong person can cost a great deal. Employers compete for certified professionals, which drives the salary gap between certified and noncertified professionals. Depending on the profession, that difference in salary may be up to 30%.” (A 2007 AMWA survey found significant increases of up to 25% for respondents with AMWA certificates.)
Jong expects the largest single block of applicants for STC certification to be independent technical communicators and lone writers, so his committee is working to make sure that their portfolios are assessed accurately and treated equally with communicators in large, supportive environments. “The challenge is to assess the applicant and not the environment,” says Jong. You can learn more on the STC Notebook blog at http://notebook.stc.org/stc-certification-update/.
Consulting and Independent Contracting SIG member Tammy Van Boening, owner of Spectrum Writing, praises her certification in Instructional System Design: “It helped me land a 15-month contract when a potential client wanted to know if I could turn participant guides and facilitator guides into training for them.”
Rich Maggiani, president of Solari Communication and an STC Fellow, is looking forward to becoming certified: “Certification has become the de facto standard for other professional organizations and is becoming one also for the IABC (International Association of Business Communications). I expect that, over time, the same will occur for technical communication certification.”
As for me, I believe certification will enhance my credibility and marketability. Of course, the process is expensive. My investment has been at least $1,200 out of pocket and more than 150 hours of study. But I agree with Derek Bok, former president of Harvard: “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”
Elizabeth (Bette) Frick, the Text Doctor (efrick@textdoctor.com), teaches technical and business writing in companies and organizations nationally and edits medical documents. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Minnesota.
