Newsletter of the East Bay Chapter of STC
March/April 2004

Meeting Report: February 2004

by Becky Rude
EBSTC President-Elect

EBSTC kicked off 2004 with a lively panel discussion of trends in technical communication. This topic was the number one choice when members voted last fall for program topics, and the large turnout proved that many of us are interested in this subject.

As usual, door prizes were also distributed at this meeting.

Panel Discussion

Beau Cain, an instructor at San Jose State University, a technical communication consultant, and a member of the Silicon Valley Chapter, moderated the panel. Following is a list of our esteemed panelists:

Panelists from left to right: Susan Becker, Marie Highby, Rolfe Dlugy-Hegwer, Eunice Malley, Gwaltney Mountford, and Beau Cain.

Becky Rude, President-Elect, and Beau Cain, panel moderator, hamming it up.

The BIG Questions

The panel set out to answer the three questions listed below. They provided excellent insight into all of these questions and provoked interesting comments from the audience. This article summarizes the discussion.

Will our profession ever again support the huge number of professionals seeking work locally?

The panel and audience seemed to agree that the answer to this question is “no.” Highby pointed out that it was so easy to get a job during the dot-com boom that many unqualified people were getting technical communication jobs, which inflated the number of employed professionals. She believes that we will return to normal numbers of employed and qualified professionals.

Are there any industries that promise any semblance of job security for technical communication professionals?

The general consensus on this question is that the only remaining industries that will provide job security in the future are those that require government clearance, as these types of jobs cannot be outsourced to other countries. There was discussion as to whether industries requiring customer confidentiality, such as banking and medical record storage, will also provide some semblance of security for U.S. technical communicators because the information must be kept secure.

Which old skills will definitely serve us in the near and long term, and what new ones must we acquire in order to succeed?

The majority of the discussion was around this topic and the panelists came up with some creative answers.

Malley

• Learn to be flexible in the type of jobs you’re willing to take.
• Learn to market yourself and the skills you can bring to a job.
• Have a second career in an area that interests you where you can use your writing ability as a secondary skill.

Dlugy-Hegwer

• Develop specialized skills that will give you an edge and separate you from everyone else. In other words, find a niche and then look for those opportunities.

Mountford

• Core technical communication skills will always be needed.
• We should look to librarians and learn from their skills in problem analysis and organizing and categorizing information. These skills are becoming essential, as we are an information-focused society with more information available every day.

Highby

• Have an active mind and strive to learn new things constantly.
• Learn how to think in business terms as both a CEO and a customer.
• Learn how to prioritize quality as it relates to company priorities because we rarely have time to complete the perfect piece of writing.
• Broaden our idea of writing and volunteer to write reports and other documents, tasks that colleagues are more than willing to give up.

Becker

• Learn to organize our email as well as the other information we’re deluged with. Becker asked a provocative question: How many emails are currently in your inbox? Most of us responded that we’ve got dozens, if not more. No one is teaching this skill!
• Play with up-and-coming technology, whatever that may be. Ten years ago those technical communicators who started playing with the Internet were forward-looking and able to stay employed.

Door Prizes

SEVEN Networks generously donated this month's door prizes. Winners from left to right are Jeanie Egbert, Rolfe Dlugy-Hegwer, and a luck prize winner whose name we do not know! If you know this person, please let me know.

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