By Linda Oestreich | STC Fellow
I have been working for more than 50 years … and in some ways, I have come full circle. When I was fresh out of high school in the San Diego, CA area, I took the Federal civil service exam. A few months later, I was hired as a GS-2 clerk-typist whose main job was typing requests for planes that were flying in the Vietnam War. After working for more than 20 years for the Feds, I left civil service as a GS-12 Supervisory Technical Writer/Editor to work in industry. I spent the next 15 years working in tech comm in and around Houston, TX, only to find that I missed San Diego and wanted to return.
My first job back in my hometown was as a tech doc manager with what is now Hewlett Packard Enterprise. About five years later, I took a job as a contract writer supporting—you guessed it—the Feds. Five years after that, I was reinstated as a Federal worker—this time as a GS-13 right back at the same command where I had worked most of those beginning 20 years. That command is the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR). We support the warfighter with information systems, cyber security, and many other systems our fighting sailors need to outfit their ships related to command, control, communications, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. We have a total employee base of about 10,000—1,000 here at headquarters where I work, 4,500 at a second San Diego location, and another 4,500 in Charleston, SC. We also have employees in New Orleans, LA; Washington, DC; Kailui, HI; and other spots around the world.
My specific job is no longer strictly tech comm. My official title is Project Manager for Leadership and Talent Development. My work entails a lot of logistics. I help write proposals for training vendors, help select those vendors, and then make or oversee all the arrangements to ensure the training happens. Those arrangements encompass everything from registering students to ensuring flip charts are in the rooms—if we can find an open room! I also am one of the coordinators for various leadership programs our top executives attend in Washington, DC, or at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. We have several other leadership events that I run or coordinate—our mentoring program, our internal leadership program for mid-career professionals, and even basic Microsoft classes in Excel, PowerPoint, and Project.
What I have found these days, despite the political divisions around the country, is that I am proud to be working for our warfighters. What I do is far removed from those who are keeping our country safe, but when I facilitate training to the executives who develop ideas and imagine innovative ways to make our service members safer and wiser, I realize that what I do is important. It’s interesting to work in a place that doesn’t pay dividends to shareholders and isn’t focused on next quarter’s earnings. Here, we pay attention to the overall working climate and how well our customers (the fleet) believe we are doing. Our working climate is tough. We work in what was once a huge aircraft factory built in 1940. It is cold, dirty, and too difficult to change into something that is commensurate with a regular office building. Finding money for all that needs to be done is difficult—our taxpayers insist on using money for other things! Although we provide high-end technological solutions to our warfighters and to the fleet that supports them, our own infrastructure is old. We also have limitations on the types of software we can use, and we’re always several versions behind what is being used “outside.”
Each of us who works in the Federal Government takes an oath of office to support and defend the Constitution. That oath makes it OK that I don’t have the best office, the best view, or a salary commensurate with my peers on the outside. Yet, I’m fully convinced that I’m part of what makes this country great. Not great again … but great today, yesterday, and always.
Linda is a well-known trainer and speaker in the world of technical communication. The topics she presents include leadership, career management, writing and editing, information design, creativity, ethics, and mind-mapping. She is an STC Fellow, former Society President, and presenter/instructor for STC. She currently works for the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command Headquarters in San Diego as a training specialist. Linda holds a BA in English from UCSD, minoring in creative writing and scientific perspectives, and she has a certificate in Project Management from Rice University.
