The Academic Conversation:<br/>CPTC Certification: What’s in it for Academics?<br/>(Part 1)

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 thomas.barker@ttu.edu. or the column blog at http://theacademicconversation.ning.com/.

In this and my next column, I would like to address some concerns that academics might have about the STC-sponsored, third-party certification program that provides the “Certified Professional in Technical Communication™” credential, or CPTC. To prepare for this work, I interviewed persons involved in the creation and ongoing development of the program, and I attended a talk about the program by the current President of STC, Hillary Hart. I also read the materials about the program on the STC website. What I learned is too much to cover in one column, so in part one of a two-part series I would like to talk about how third-party certification works and how academic credentials prepare a person for certification. In part two, I will address the issues of the broader implications of certification for our field and why academics can, and should, apply for the certification.

How Does CPTC Certification Work?

Professional certification is all about workplace experience. The STC Certification Commission takes the approach that at least five years’ experience should be enough for a person to demonstrate competencies in the five areas of practice (user, task, and experience design; information design; process management; information development; and information production). Theoretically, if a person has five years’ experience doing those activities, then that person should be able to demonstrate and explain competence. But not everyone has five years of full-time experience, so the commission set up a sliding scale, allowing you to count your college degree. With a degree in technical communication or a directly related field, you can apply with three years’ experience. What if your degree is in a “relevant” field, such as English, journalism, or public relations? Then you can apply with four years’ experience.

Academics may quibble with these guidelines and debate the valuing, or devaluing, of the degree, but for third-party certification, experience is the key. You can argue about whether a degree is “related” or not, and I think you can make a case for how one’s degree (let’s say a degree in English with a technical communication specialization) should count as “directly related.” One can also argue that the degree alone should “certify” a person, but then, where is the guarantee of workplace competence? In some ways, academic programs provide workplace experience, through service-learning projects, cooperative learning, and internships. But, in my view, no student who just takes courses will graduate with the equivalent of five years’ workplace experience.

One might ask, however, as my colleague Ken Baake did, “What is it about workplace experience that is not duplicated in academic training?” Maybe some skills are honed or milestones passed in the workplace that do not exist in an academic setting. Many academics already presume that we provide these to students and that academic programs do not need to be reconfigured. Is there some unteachable tacit knowledge that only experience on the job can provide?

Frankly, I’m not sure I have an answer to these questions. It has always been my approach that classes and jobs provide complementary elements in education, that they work together in some way, and that we academics work with practitioners to identify our contributions. Certification tries to measure the result of these contributions. It does this through a packet of materials—essentially a work portfolio, which may be all we have as “proof” of professionalism.

How Does One Apply for Certification?

Certification also requires that applicants, in addition to filling out an application form, supply a packet, like a portfolio, of samples, work artifacts, and commentaries about the work. The rationale for this approach is that applicants need to show not that they can do something, but that they have done it. Academics might quibble with this requirement, saying that graduates of university programs are already prepared for professional work. The problem that I see with this argument is that we don’t actually know a student can do the work for which a technical communication degree prepares them. We may think we do, but it’s very difficult to guarantee this outcome based on the curriculum of most technical communication programs.

In fact, the question of how academic programs are assessed is itself changing. One well-known measure has to do with internal program design: does the program offer a coordinated curriculum or set of outcomes in classes that prepare students to meet the overall program outcomes? This assessment method is dubious because even a coordinated curriculum cannot guarantee workplace success. A packet of actual workplace documents, such as that required by a third-party certification program, might do that. In some universities, program review now requires administrators to supply evidence that students are actually doing the professional work for which we prepare them. I spoke with Saul Carliner, an expert in the area of third-party certification and a board member for the STC Certification Commission, about this issue. His perspective is that, “There are a fair amount of students who come out [of technical communication programs] unprepared for the workplace.” Following this reasoning, academic program assessment might take the lead from certification. We could argue that our programs are successful by identifying graduates who went on to acquire the CPTC certification.

Employers Need to See Skills

But from the employers’ standpoint, they want to know that the person applying for a tech writing job, or advertising him- or herself as a consultant, has the skills to produce effective information products for a company. That’s the bottom line for employers. Their quandary is how to tell who can do that, and third-party certification aims squarely to measure competency. How so?

The theory behind third-party certification is that a credential, if it measures the right skills, can provide assurance that this person brings the necessary skills to the job. Actually, it is not a matter of skills but of “knowledge, skills, and abilities,” or KSAs in certification parlance. For job applicants without the credential, a hiring professional would look to one’s university degree, work experience, industry understanding, and other indicators to decide whether to hire candidate A or candidate B. The problem is that employers don’t know one degree from another, don’t necessarily know what work experience applies to their production needs, or don’t know how to read other indicators like resumes and portfolios. Many employers may not know enough about technical communicators to tell the real thing from a tech writer wannabe. Portfolios often simply show a person’s work but don’t indicate the backstory of what a person contributed to the project. And in a climate of limited hiring and training resources, employers want as much assurance as possible. If certification can measure workplace achievement and identify persons with both skills and understanding of the principles behind their work, then we, as a field, have moved closer to the goal of providing consistent and measureable value.

Degree Versus Experience

Providing value to employers is a goal that both academics and practitioners can appreciate, and certification seems to allow for both degrees and experience to count. I talked to Chairman Steven Jong about how the Certification Commission sees the relationship of degrees and certification. He justified the sliding scale of degree/experience by evoking the difference between those who think all you need is experience and those who think all you need is a degree. The commission takes the stance that both are valuable, and that both can contribute to the qualities needed to be certified.

How do we know that CPTC provides assurance that a person can do the job? Because it validates that they have done it before. The premise of the program is what I would call “behaviorist.” If a person can demonstrate that he or she has actually done the job and understands the basic reasons why he or she succeeded in the job, then that person is probably a good bet for doing the job again. So CPTC is all about “what you did” and finding out ways to demonstrate and measure it.

However, here is an important point about certification. The fact that a person has a degree does not qualify him or her for certification. All a degree does is allow a person to apply. The evaluation of the person’s work portfolio follows the same procedure and looks at the same evidence regardless of degree qualifications. And this makes sense to me because, for the credential to be valid, it has to be based on a standard set of capabilities, regardless of the route you took to get them. This is why I call this the behaviorist approach to capabilities: if you can show that you have what it takes, then you have it.

Why Certification at All?

For those who ask why we need certification in the first place, and why we can’t simply certify students who earn college degrees in technical communication, I would ask them to look at the complexity of the workplace and the work that technical communicators actually do. The difference between a college graduate in technical communication and a person holding CPTC certification is the difference between a person ready to do a job and a person who has experience on the job. The academic program provides the readiness for a job, but the workplace provides the experience. Both contribute to the ideal technical communicator, which can then be measured by the certification process.

Admittedly, academic programs provide some workplace experience. Aside from the aura of workplace experience students pick up from their instructors, the usual mechanism for providing industry knowledge in classes is the industry advisory board and the internship. The advisory board, and not all academic programs have them, is a group of employers or industry representatives who review program content and design (outcomes taught through university classes) and who assist program administrators in shaping courses and curriculum so they can provide the best preparation for workplace competency. Advisory boards help administrators identify workplace projects, types of documents, management processes, and other workplace abilities. Sometimes advisory boards are supplemented by mentorship programs, like the one at Florida State. But these mechanisms do not provide actual experience.

Internships, cooperative education programs, and, in some cases, community service-learning opportunities, actually do put students in the workplace where they can interact with professionals and learn experientially. But most academic programs only offer one or two semesters of internship, mentoring, or other direct experience with the workplace. Certification does not discount that experience, and the more a program can place students in the workplace, the better. A student could include information products developed for an internship employer as evidence in his or her CPTC application packet. But how many TC program administrators would argue that their internship program is equivalent to three, four, or five years’ full-time experience? Few, I would think.

In this column I’ve discussed some of the basics of certification, what it is, and how you apply, and looked at the importance of workplace experience as the key element in and justification for certification. In part 2 of this column, I’ll discuss further why certification is inevitable and justified for our profession and how certification of academics might occur.