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On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 7:55 PM, Sarah Stegall<sstegall -at- bivio -dot- net> wrote:
> Amen to that, Gene. To some managers, a tech writer over forty who has
> never been a manager spells "loser".
Unfortunately our government concurs (at least those of us living in
the states). I found out at a workshop at our local Career Center
that the US Department of Labor categorizes anyone over 40 as a
"mature worker" and from the sounds of their workshop titles, they
consider that to be a disadvantage.
> I think the perception that a career must be
> always and forever "onward and upward" is a major flaw in American
> managerial thinking.
I agree. When my company was bought by IBM I tried to assimilate to
the Big Blue culture and attended one of their all day career planning
workshops. After spending about a half a day listening to how I
should be moving up, getting patents, and planning to take over the
world I finally raised my hand and asked "But what if I like my job
and want to keep doing it?" The presenter was clearly flustered. As
if she had never considered that someone might actually keep doing
something they were qualified to do instead of wanting to be promoted
to the level of their incompetence (for those of you familiar with the
Peter Principle...). There are plenty of ideas, new skills, new
technologies, new products, etc to keep me challenged as a technical
writer for years without me ever needing to move up the corporate
ladder to management.
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