By Liz Pohland | Senior Member
At the 2013 Summit in Atlanta, GA, STC celebrated its 60th year supporting technical communication and, to commemorate the event, a new initiative was launched—the STC Advisory Council. The Council had its first meeting during the Summit on Monday, 6 May.
The function of the council is to serve as an industry “think tank” that advises and makes recommendations to the STC Board of Directors. Council members draw from their experience and expertise and serve as strategists to help advance technical communication in the workplace. Members are stakeholders, such as senior executives, who work in a wide range of industries. Attendees at the May 2013 meeting included representatives from Adobe, American Public University System, Boston Scientific, CA Technologies, Google, IBM, MadCap Software, and Oracle. Academia was also present with professors and program directors from Virginia Tech and Texas Tech. In addition, several STC Board members and staff were present.
STC President Alan Houser (now Past President) steered the meeting, which began with an introduction, welcome remarks, and the purpose of the Council. “This is a new, exciting initiative by the Society for Technical Communication. These high-level representatives from the academic, industrial, and vendor communities have formed an invaluable resource, to the STC and to each other, for monitoring and staying ahead of trends in the profession.”
Echoing his inaugural address at the Annual Business Meeting at the 2012 Summit, Houser commented:
It’s an exciting time to be a technical communicator! It’s also a time of great change for our profession and its members. By partnering with these advisors, STC is maintaining its role as a go-to resource and champion for the technical communication profession.
To form the STC Advisory Council, the Society reached out to our key stakeholders: the academic community that educates our members, the industrial community that employs our members, and the vendor community that provides the tools many of our members use daily. By chartering this group, STC continues its mission as an advocate for our evolving profession.
Discussion centered around how technical communicators add value to products and services, the roles they play in organizational landscapes, the perceptions of technical communicators—from their supervisors, their peers, and those outside their workplaces—and what employers, educators, vendors, and STC can do to support the field.
For newly appointed STC Executive Director Chris Lyons, this meeting was one of his first events on the job. “I’m really pleased at the response from companies to our advisory council,” he said. “STC members frequently discuss how their jobs are changing and their skills are used in new ways. What we need to better understand is how the constant change looks from the corporate side and what is driving it. That way we can ensure our members are better able to join the conversation within their companies and are trained in the right tools and skills that will be needed.”
