Newsletter of the East Bay Chapter of STC
March/April 2003

Willamette Valley Chapter Update

by Susan Harlan
EBSTC President-Elect

This article is a sidebar to Susan's article Alternative Jobs or Alternative Job Search Methods? in this issue.

The New Reality

Jean Richardson is the Mentoring Manager for the WVC chapter in Portland, Oregon, and the person who drove the effort to create a successful Retooling seminar in January 2002. That seminar helped many people see the alternatives available to them as Technical Communicators. She recently sent a report on what their chapter is doing now:

"Since the Retooling workshop we have continued to work on keeping technical communication a vital career option for our membership. Last spring a group of very senior technical communicators discussed the topic of how technical communicators respond to change. They labeled the phenomenon 'professional resiliency.'

"This group also put together a proposal for restructuring our SIGs to provide a stronger sense of community. We will implement a pilot of the proposal in May. In April, our chapter is meeting with the Mid-Valley Chapter of STC to collaborate on a program related to job search skills.

"Recently, our Contractors SIG hosted a particularly empowering program on labor trends for technical writers. The speaker was an Oregon state economist. The news was quite sobering. We are not in a temporary downturn but a fundamental restructuring of the market. What has been a gut sense for many of our members was confirmed by data: We must actively redirect our skills, expectations, and marketing efforts in response to our new reality."

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