Guest post by Steven Jong, Chair, STC Certification Committee
Since STC announced certification at the Summit in May, the momentum has built. An implementation committee honed the original proposal into a business plan. We clarified the areas of practice and are subjecting it to additional validation. (Later this year an academic group will perform a formal validation.) The STC staff analyzed the fee schedule, including possible member discounts, initial pricing, and package deals. Soon we will engage a consultant to advise us of any further refinements.
To help people stay informed of and offer comments on our progress, the Certification Committee will be one of the first groups using the STC Community website. We expect to go live in a few weeks. In the meantime, we have been reaching out to inform members and solicit comments from practitioners: on this blog, on the TECHWR-L list, and at chapter meetings. I presented to the New York Metro chapter in June and fielded what felt like a downpour of questions. I will be presenting at the Carolina Chapter on August 19 (click here for details about live Web access) and at the Boston Chapter later this year.
Our next major task is to translate the areas of practice into an assessment protocol. How do we determine whether an applicant meets our criteria in each area of practice? How can we accommodate applicants whose work may be confidential or proprietary? (New York Metro raised this issue.) From the answers will come an assessment methodology we can pilot, optimize, teach to evaluators, and ultimately put into action.
To sum up: a lot has been done, there’s more to do, and we’re working on it. For more information or to volunteer, contact Steven Jong by email.
That confidential/proprietary issue is a big one. For example, I’ve spent the last 2 years working on content that I could NEVER submit for assessment — I just would not get permission to do so. And prior to that, much of the work I’ve done has been confidential/proprietary and subject to NDAs. The last batch of work I did that I *might* have got permission to submit was done 5 years ago. A lot has changed since, and I wouldn’t feel comfortable about submitting work I did then, even if 5-year-old work was acceptable to the assessment panel. Then there’s the issue of finding someone to give permission for old work, when the company has been taken over by another.
An idea on confidential and proprietary submissions: Suppose applicants for certification were told to strip out any proprietary references in the documentation submitted for certification, substituting similar but “generic” information in its place? It’s a little more work for the applicant, but on occasion I’ve had to do this in the past in order to submit writing samples for consideration of employment.
A similar thought is for applicants submitting large documentation sets (i.e. user guides, API references, and online help packages) to replace pages with actionable material with something like “This page intentionally left blank due to proprietary materials.” So long as the documentation gives the reviewers a general sense of their documentation and information delivery abilities, this should work in conjunction with paragraph 1 of this message.
What about those who are looking to certify without a body of work for assessment? Or without a current body of work?
When you perform certain types of work (e.g., government), you cannot submit even “stripped down” versions of your work or risk losing your security clearance.
From an advocacy standpoint, I think certification is absolutely necessary to promote technical communication as a profession, rather than a series of tasks that anyone with access to a word processor can perform.
As a practitioner, I have to ask, what’s in it for me? What’s the value proposition? Why would I or my employer pay hundreds of dollars for this? If I’ve got limited financial resources, why would I chose STC Certification over an iPad or a beach vacation? I’m not sold on this yet. I hope that when certification is ready to roll out, I will be.
One cannot genericize documents for which one does not have the original files. Contractors usually do not get to walk out the door with those files.
Is a committee person or other STC official going to respond to this issue on this blog? or where? Thanks.
We think we have addressed the prioprietary issue. The submissions we will be requiring are light on published works and heavy on work artifacts, such as plans. we will be requiring applicant and company names to be redacted. Evaluators will be required to sign non-disclosure forms. And there will be opportunities to substitute simulated work materials for real ones.