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Connie Giordano pointed out some of the drawbacks of the TW "certification"
test at Brainbench.com.
>The cons are that within the questions, methodology is more important than
real-world content, and that methodology tends to rely overly much on one or
two experts. In addition, I found some terminology, such as storyboarding a
bit confusing, because storyboarding has a different connotation for those
of us who came out of marketing and advertising.
I, too, had issues when I took the test (back when they were free...). I
didn't find that the questions really reflected TW as I know it. Then again,
how could any test? That, more than anything, would preclude a TW
professional certification. The skills that one TW finds essential may be
little better than useless to another. After all, my "weak areas," according
to Brainbench, were "Online/Hypermedia/Interactive Media" (or is that just
one area? whatever...). Of course, because I do paper docs, I haven't really
needed those specific skills yet. We would need a whole host of sub-tests to
capture the specific knowledge necessary to the different environments in
which we work, even assuming that content knowledge would not be part of the
test.
I think the ISTC's "National Occupational Standards for Technical
Communicators" (http://www.istc.org.uk/nattc.html) is interesting reading,
and at a glance, seems pretty comprehensive and detailed, but I don't know
enough about them to know whether they're useful or relevant in the real
world (do folks meeting these standards get better jobs/pay?). Anyone
familiar with these standards who can comment on them?
Meg Ehr
Jack of all trades, Master of... nine, apparently...
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