Certify this!

Technical communicators, you can now be certified! This past week, STC just announced a new certification for technical communicators. And for those in the field (and for those who teach those in the field), this really is big news.

We have an identity!

The first thing that hits me – we can now definitively say what makes someone a technical communicator. Being able to have a specific, quantifiable definition of what makes someone a tech commer will really help to get rid of that image of us as simply “glorified secretaries.” No longer (we can hope) will the skills necessary to produce high-quality forms of communication be seen as something that anyone can do. When this certification becomes hard to come by, employers will most likely become more convinced that authoring well is a hard skill to develop.

STC, according to their post, has defined six areas as the basis of the certification:

• User analysis
• Document design
• Project management
• Authoring (content creation)
• Delivery
• Quality assurance

I’m not entirely clear on whether one can get certification in individual areas, or whether there’s a blanket certification that requires mastery of all 6 areas. But, still, these will now represent the six primary skills that TCers bring to the table. And that’s nice and defined.

We have something to teach!

And, for those of us who teach tech comm, these six bullets would make wonderful course and/or degree objectives. When we’ve got a student who shows interest in being a technical communicator, we can now pull out this list and say, “learn these six things and you’ll become one.” Ok, well not exactly. But it is a nice roadmap for the student.

What about all of those faculty meetings where the creative writers claim they can do as good of a job as the tech comm specialists in the Intro course? Well, we now have ammunition to challenge that claim. Can you teach a student how to analyze an audience, manage a project, assure quality, and define effectively if your training is in writing poetry? Hunh, can you? (No offense intended to any poets out there. I’m sure it’s very difficult finding a word that rhymes with “orange” 😉 )

STC did this one right, too. The certification is not something that can be gotten straight out of college:

Certification will be based on assessing portfolios and work artifacts, not examinations. (In other words, there are no tests.)

That is, we don’t have to follow the lead of public schools and “teach to the test.” Rather, we’re giving students skills that they can then use to develop a portfolio over a couple years – and then they get certified. (my guess is this clause is in there to satisfy all the instructors out there)

This does bring up an interesting possibility – can we have students develop an extensive enough portfolio during college so that they can get certified right out of graduation? STC doesn’t elaborate on what the detailed requirements are for certification (apparently in a yet-to-be-released webpage). But if we were to build our programs around developing a portfolio, could a student produce enough documents to at least come close to certification? Potentials for classes and projects abound, no?

But are we pigeon-holed?

My initial apprehension, though, is that we may end up limiting ourselves. A lot of effort over the last couple years has gone into broadening the reach of the discipline. If we limit ourselves to these six traditional areas — and especially if we set criteria for meeting those areas based on “traditional” tech comm documents — will we limit the fields that are legitimate to study? Will medical rhetoric still be in-bounds? Scientific rhetoric? Historical documents? Gaming? Or will those fields fall to the rhetors out there, becoming unjustifiable for a tech commer?

I know, I know. The lines aren’t that clearly cut between tech comm and rhetoric. But will certification for TC make those lines more distinct? And by extension, separate the two fields more than they already are?

Still, happy day

But given these fears, I still think this is a good thing for the field. That question broached in every graduate level intro course — “what is technical communication?” — at least has a good start at an answer.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go begin putting together my portfolio for certification…