By Thomas Barker | Fellow
This column focuses on a broad range of practical academic issues from teaching and training to professional concerns, research, and technologies of interest to teachers, students, and researchers. Please send comments and suggestions to ttbarker@ualberta.ca or the column blog at http://the academicconversation.ning.com/.
Technical communication academics use research to uncover the underlying principles of writing style, audience analysis, and document design, and to teach those underlying principles. Not satisfied with simple facts that a design works or not, they ask why it works. What psychological mechanisms, for example, in a risk message can turn a reader from being risk prone to being risk averse, and maybe safer on the job site? The same holds for the topic of this column of The Academic Conversation. What are the dynamics that drive a successful technical communication career? In it, we look below the surface of job markets, interview techniques, and other concerns, and examine the changing job markets, professional networking, and other long-term dynamics of planning a successful career.
A Student’s Dilemma
This is not to say that interview skills, job-searching techniques, and résumé construction are not important. They are fundamental to landing the next job after graduation, and the one after that. But to illustrate what I mean, let me examine a conversation I had with a soon-to-be graduate in a technical communication masters program. In this example, Mason Rizzo has experience as a graduate research assistant in a university setting. I employ these assistants myself and can attest to the great work they do as communicators. Mason’s questions fell into three categories: perception of job roles, culture, and long-term career planning.
How will my job skills look in a variety of settings? “While I believe I have obtained the skills necessary to excel as a technical writer,” he says, “I’m nervous of the perception people might have of me.” How can skills as a research assistant map onto the skills needed in positions that you would more readily associate with technical writing? Here the issue is a matter of a student needing to see core skills across domains.
Another question Mason had was about culture. “I’m used to a partnership of writing teams and engineering teams on my present job. How will that fit in with workplace engineering cultures that might not value technical writing as much? Will I be prepared culturally?” Clearly students need to see not just the culture of technical communicators, but also appreciate intercultural aspects of employment and skill translation.
These two questions lead logically to issues about starting “an edifying career.” Mason already has his “next job” lined up, but it’s as a public relations consultant in a small marketing firm. This contingency plan leaves him questioning his future: “I quit a really great research assistant job for an undesirable position doing something that I don’t enjoy and, more importantly, being in a position that does not employ my skills as a writer.” Rightly, he is scared that this will end up as a “keep-me-busy” job but not the stepping stone to a career.
These questions about perception, about culture, and about career transitions suggest that our graduates need help beyond just getting the next job. As a first step, we should ask what employers want from our graduates.
What Employers Want
A 2013 study of 318 employers done by Hart Research Associates emphasizes innovation as a priority for employers. “Innovation is essential,” say 95% of respondents. Likewise employers value critical thinking, judgment, integrity, and problem solving in real-world environments—skills we teach in our courses. We see these competencies reflected in Mason’s questions about skill transferability and culture. However, a surprising find of the Hart study was this: “Two in three employers (67%) believe that most college graduates have the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in entry-level positions, but only 44% think they have what is required for advancement and promotion to higher levels.” This last finding points to the broader concern we saw in Mason’s last challenge: he needed more than the next job skills, but a planning agenda for careers.
To answer this challenge, I asked some colleagues how they addressed career planning in their programs.
Help Students Plan for Job Diversity
A fact of life in technical communication that many academics might not see is the bewildering diversity of positions and career paths that face our students. I asked Dr. Steven Bernhardt, at the University of Delaware, what he thought the main change was in the employment picture for students today, compared to, say, 10 years ago. “ I think the major change,” said Bernhardt, “is increased unpredictability. It’s very hard to set a clear target job. We think many of our students are placing well, some exceptionally so, but they are going in many directions and there is no clear path.” Faculty members have always urged students to consider the relevance of technical communication skills in a variety of contexts, but today the message may need more emphasis.
One way to do this, suggests STC Vice President Kit Brown-Hoekstra, is to use skills mapping for students. Skills mapping helps them see beyond the next job so they can plan long-term for careers. She points to an infographic created by Red Gate Software and reprinted here in Brian Harris’s article on page 6. The skills map begins with core skills (in the center) and plots career development on four axes: specialization, product/domain emphasis, leadership, and project development. Skills beyond the traditional core, achieved over time and experience, can lead to a career trajectory model for students, rather than a “next job” focus.
Use Contact with Alumni
One way to bring the long-term perspective into the classroom is by contact with alumni. I had a conversation with a graduate of our program who felt the need for communication over time and beyond the classroom. He expressed feeling “disappointed with the lack of communication from former faculty.” And it is a two-way street: alumni enjoy continued advice and mentoring from faculty members, who benefit by tracking graduate’s career pathways. If students become members, then the Academic SIG of STC can help them keep in touch. Dr. Kathy Northcut, at Missouri University of Science and Technology, uses even more aggressive tactics. “Our department chair has held several alumni career panels. They’re fascinating because we have both English and tech comm degree programs, and you never know who will end up where, doing what. The students have appreciated that event, and last year we filled the room.” Career panels like this one help students gain a long-term prospective on their careers. Other ways to involve alumni are in award review panels, e-portfolio reviews, and program advisory panels.
Helping Students Prepare Networks
Increasingly, academics are preparing students to use a network perspective. The website monster.com can help a student find a job, but a connection through professional networking sites like Linkedin can help a student understand the need for a personal learning network. This can help students overcome anxiety over the decay of the degree’s relevance and the obsolescence of job training. Dr. Joe Moses, assistant director of graduate studies at the University of Minnesota, engages students in discussions and activities that support the building of personal learning networks. According to Moses, “students use a variety of tools for connecting with other students, thought leaders, industry participants, and others to support life-long learning in the technical communication field. By integrating digital media theory and practice into coursework and asking students to think critically about where, when, and how they learn, we build bridges between institutional and organizational cultures.”
Linkedin, as you can see from the Figure 1, allows readers to create conceptually and visually interesting graphic representations of personal learning networks. These can help students see the importance of creating and maintaining long-term connections.
Use Professional Organizations
Professional organizations, such as STC and its Special Interest Groups (SIGs), the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA), the Professional Writers Association of Canada (PWAC), and others offer networking and long-term connections that can help students plan long and varied careers. STC’s Technical Communication Body of Knowledge (http://stcbok.editme.com/) has a section on “Careers” and “Professional Development.” Here students get a good overview of what professional development is and how they can manage their resources to build a long-term career perspective. The advice in this section is that “throughout their careers, technical communicators must keep pace with—and often contribute to—evolving academic theory and scholarship.”
Career planning, as we have seen, can compliment the usual work we do to prepare students with resumes, interview skills, and job resources. Planning can use available resources such as alumni networks and professional organizations to help students see beyond the “next job” to a rich and varied career as a technical communicator.
Resources
Pratt, Ellis. Letter from the UK: Red Gate Software’s Technical Communication Skills Map. STC’s Notebook blog, 15 October 2013, http://notebook.stc.org/letter-from-the-uk-red-gate-softwares-technical-communication-skills-map/.
Hart Research Associates (2013). It Takes More Than a Major: Employer Priorities for College Learning and Student Success: An Online Survey Among Employers Conducted on Behalf of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, www.aacu.org/leap/documents/2013_EmployerSurvey.pdf.
