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>I am in favor of certification because it may greatly simplify the job
>of the hiring employer. Part of our job as prospective employees is to make
>their decision as easy, as painless, and as simple as possible.
That's thoughtful of you, but hiring is already arbitrarily easy, simple,
and painless -- all the manager has to do is be indifferent to results,
or resigned to bad results.
While certification gives a criterion on which to sort resumes, that
isn't hard to do now. The hard thing to do is hire writers who perform
well in the specific job at hand. As most of us who have hired writers
know, this doesn't correlate well to credentials. Very often a
secretary will magically blossom into a fearless, death-defying tech
writer before your very eyes, while people with the right credentials,
good recommendations, excellent samples, perfect test scores, wonderful
interviewing skills, and precisely relevant prior experience will
fail miserably.
Unless your proposed certification process actually ADDRESSES this
problem, it's just an exclusionary process that benefits certificate
holders at the expense of non-holders, and, at best, allows managers
to make questionable decisions with greater confidence.
-- Robert
--
Robert Plamondon * President/Managing Editor, High-Tech Technical Writing, Inc
36475 Norton Creek Road * Blodgett * Oregon * 97326
robert -at- plamondon -dot- com * (541) 453-5841 * Fax: (541) 453-4139
