I’m thrilled and honored to have been elected STC Vice President and to start the year as STC President. This is such an invigorating time for technical communicators. Over the next several years, I believe we will see a profound change in the way businesses view our role, and in the contributions we make to business success.
Technological change is driving the pressure on businesses and organizations to innovate more than ever before. Customer and market behaviors are re-defining entire industries and changing the relationships between businesses and their customers.
In the midst of all this change, businesses must think differently about information and how people consume content. Customers no longer want to just hear promotional advertising—they want to be informed and to get real value from each and every communication they receive. They want content that helps them solve their problems. And that’s the very content that we create.
The impact that technical communicators have as a professional community continues to become more powerful, and the understanding of how to bring technical content together with marketing, sales, support, and other parts of the business will be an essential part of business strategy. No longer are we “documenting products in the corner.” We are helping solve our customers’ problems. And we’re doing that by shaping and delivering the content that shows them how we can make their lives easier. By building and promoting compelling content, we raise our visibility in our organizations and show the value we add in building these strong customer relationships. Technical communicators have a lot to offer, and the time to establish our position as a central element of the customer experience is now.
STC is dedicated to enabling our members to develop and cultivate the skills and knowledge to take full advantage of these changes. STC exists to help you learn, network, and grow. In the future, it’s imperative to show business managers how to better partner with technical communicators like us to improve every interaction with their customers and their markets.
This is a transformative time for all of us, which makes this a transformative time for STC. We have a new CEO. We have a new board. We have a new and growing certification program. And we have a renewed ambition for positioning STC as the voice of technical communication.
So thank you. Thank you for your faith in this board, and your faith in the staff. Thank you for the countless hours you put in to help our society, our discipline, and our members. Seth Mattison talked in his opening keynote at the Summit about our relationships. The business and personal relationships we form through STC are the backbone of the Society. I’m excited to work with you to continue to build a society that helps all of us connect not only to each other, but to our businesses, our organizations, and our customers in increasingly relevant and impactful ways.
