STC: The Next Fifty Years
This week is the 55th Annual Conference in Philadelphia. If you see me say hello. Text from DJCline.com.
At last week’s STC Silicon Valley 50th Anniversary celebration people asked me what the next fifty years were going to be like for technical communicators. I had to think about it.
Fifty years ago you should have had a specific engineering or science background and a degree in English. You got one college degree and worked at one job for forty years. You would probably lived and worked in the same place for most of your life. You had great benefits and pension that would pay for the three years you lived after retirement.
Today you might have several degrees and work at a new job every year. You might move around every couple of years. You take a few classes a year and maybe your company will pay for it. For retirement you herd several 401k plans around and hope Social Security will buy you enough Soylent Green to get you to the end of the month.
The future? The movement toward just-in-time or on-demand service looks unstoppable. Customers want only what they need when they want it. Google gives people snippets of the information rather than cumbersome software manuals or online help. There are companies that produce short video clips on how to do specific tasks. The videos are available online and supported by advertising. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a good video is priceless.
Freelancers are on the frontier. You will need to know about writing, databases, multimedia and intellectual property. You should be constantly learning something new, but going for another college degree may be too slow to the learn skills that may be obsolete in four years. You may move constantly from one short term project to another. You may not move geographically but virtually, collaborating on projects and then moving on. There won’t be health insurance, daycare or a career path. There will be a paycheck. If you are lucky it will be in euros or yuan.
You may already be doing this. In Silicon Valley I know executives that will not touch anyone who has worked more than ten years for one company. Frankly they look a little odd at folks that spend more than five. Degrees are nice but they want to know what you can do for them right now. They won’t pay for training because they believe that is your responsibility. We need to keep following the example of software developers that create special interest groups. In a way we have more experience social networking than they do. Other technical communicators can help each other stay current in their profession.
I know some technical communicators are thinking about certification and government reclassification. I think any standard will be obsolete by the time it is approved. I’m betting my shrink-wrapped copies of Novell Certification, Wordperfect and Interleaf on it. There were lots of ‘required skills’ I was supposed to drop everything and shell out a few hundred bucks for. In the end it is my ability to explain complex subjects that pays the bills. The tools change, the job does not. Expect more chaos and take advantage of the opportunities as they happen.
If I’m wrong about any of this, remind me in fifty years.
Copyright 2008 DJ Cline All rights reserved.
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