[TCP] certification (was: ranting STC)

[John Posada]

> TWs and contractors, yes. Employers who invest in TW development? 
> Hahahaahahahaaha :-) Is it a joke?

Where I am now, I don't get my quarterly bonus unless I've included
some training in my quarterly MBO. In the last year, I've purchased
outside training courses for IPv6, UML, DITA, a complete college
semester on UNIX, and a half-dozen internally run training courses. 

> Sounds cool, but my experience is the manager who would rather 
> get a budget for someone with the skill, instead of getting a
> training budget for existing staff. That manager is everywhere,
> doesn't come from 

I know for a fact that we have a specific budgeted number allocated
toward training. I won't give the number here, but it is not paltry.

> > By the way, aside to John, I can read about usability and 
> > learn some hints to apply to my work, and not have to take 
> > a formal course - much of which would be me-or-my-employer 
> > paying for review of stuff I'd already read - but it won't 
> > help me any more or less in talking with the company usability 
> > engineer(s).  We don't have any of those.

Hints. Hints does not make you literate in any technology or
methodology.  


> I worked with a PhD Human Factors guy one time. He wore 
> a lab coat and did a workplace documentation experiment to 
> see if people prefered left-right pages or all-right pages 
> for documentation in 3-ring binders. 
> The result? Inconclusive. Fuh, he had it made.

The key phrase is "one time". To judge what he does by one thing he
did is like judging technical writing because one day, you observered
one spending the who day changing a document set from 10 pt to 12 pt.


> Age may be a lurking factor in all studies of certification
> enrollment rates. I naively wonder if this insight has 
> implications for the place of less-young tech writers in the
> workforce.

Hey...I'm in my 50's and I figure I have another 20 years in this
profession. That's plenty of time to do whatever I want.

John Posada
Senior Technical Writer

"I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is."