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> We should not, in other words, aim for a certificate that says the
> person who possesses it is a _master_ of every related discipline.
> The certificate should be evidence that the individual takes the
> craft/discipline/profession/whatever-you-want-to-call-it seriously.
> But it should not be taken as proof that the person knows
everything
> there is to know about this particular job opening. That
information
> should come from the education and experience the person lists or
> from the responses to interview questions.
Dick...I might have failed in getting my viewpoint across, but this
is exactly what I've been trying to say. We cannot be expected to the
guru in everything we are associated with. However, a certified
technical writer should have a conversational familiarity with as
many associated skills as needed to handle "the big project"
...be able to schedule a 10am meeting with the project management
people and have an intelligent conversation with them on their turf,
hold a lunch meeting with the DBAs and understand their requirments
at an IT level, have a 3pm meeting with the CFO and discuss ROIs for
the upcoming project with her, then gather the writers at 5pm and
discuss whether the upcoming project should comnform to InfoMapping
methodologies (the CEO snd his big ideas) or not, then a 6pm meeting
with the XML developers to start the development of the documentation
schemas. Between meetings? start creating a draft of the TOC for the
part of the document set you'll be writing.
John Posada
Senior Technical Writer
"What do we want? More than
anybody else has."
Steve Ballmer
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