4-01 (December 2001) Education and Training by Kenneth T. Rainey

 

Introduction

Technical communication as a profession should have some mechanism for identifying and validating the work that its professionals do. In many countries in Europe, professional societies have made some progress in this direction (see, for example, National occupational standards, SAQ/TECOM).

In the USA, all work in the direction of certification by professional organizations has, for the moment, ceased. The only effort that is proceeding - and I am not sure at what point it has arrived - is an effort by Educational Testing Service to establish a certification examination. The only other work that I know of is a study by the Northwest Consortium on Emerging Technologies (NWCET), which includes a study of technical writing competencies in its report (see NWCET).

The consuming public, employers, government agencies, and academic institutions, not to mention individual professionals, would benefit from an objective, fair, and meaningful system of certification. Professional societies of technical communication have an ethical obligation to accept accountability for the work that their members perform. In an effort to encourage movement towards acceptance of that responsibility, here I identify the issues and assess the benefits and disadvantages of certification.

 

Reasons for certification

Five reasons justify an objective, fair, and meaningful system of certification that would be beneficial for the profession.

1. Some people are performing technical communication tasks for good money without having the necessary training or education or skills to do that work. This situation weakens the work that qualified technical communicators perform, brings into question the legitimacy of the profession, and casts an ethical cloud over the practice of technical communication (see Hayman, 1994a; 1994b; Hale, 2000).
2. Product development processes employed by industries have a profound impact on their personal and corporate product development cycles and authoring strategies and, thus, on a corporation’s bottom-line. Industries have every right to expect that those they employ understand product development processes and are qualified to implement them. Certification in the field would benefit industry and the profession.
3. Industry hires unqualified people with education marginally related to technical communication because there are not enough graduates of technical communication programs. Thus, the solution to the problem of unqualified practitioners is a steady and sufficient supply of qualified professionals. A system of certification that would lead ultimately to a system of accreditation would not guarantee a sufficient supply of professionals, but it would guarantee a qualified supply of professionals.
4. Programs in the education of technical communicators could do a better job if they had some measures and specific standards by which to construct, evaluate, and revise their curricula and by which to evaluate their products (their graduates). The diversity of the current programs in technical communication is an ultimate strength of technical communication education. Yet this diversity should be built upon a solid foundation of basic knowledge and skills that under girds any program of instruction, irrespective of diverse approaches to curricula and program requirements.
5. The basic knowledge and basic skill sets arising from an objective, fair, and meaningful system of certification will strengthen the profession by assuring that all certified professionals meet the same minimum standards.

 

Necessary conditions

Jeff Hibbard, a former President of the Society for Technical Communication in the USA, summarizes the issues succinctly and pointedly. Certification is supportable if all five of the following factors can be realized:

• A valid test
• An agreed-upon body of knowledge
• Competent administration
• A credible agency
• A reasonable cost

We can achieve competent administration either by contracting with a professional testing organization, like Educational Testing Service, or, more surely, by creating the organization to administer the tests ourselves. This is where the legal argument against certification comes in. The argument is that any organization would be liable if they certified a professional and then someone charged that professional with dereliction of duty or malpractice. Of course, that is an issue! The resolution to that threat is not, however, to cower in fear and abandon the effort so that one can continue a comfortable, worry-free life. The question is whether certification is valuable enough to risk making it legally defensible. And, further, whether certification is valuable enough to create an administrative mechanism and a substantive process that is legally defensible. I believe that it is, and I will try to show why in just a moment.

 

So, do we NEED . . .?

All of the considerations above - although problematic and requiring much energy and creativity to resolve - are only the aggravating details of an issue that rises, for me, above the cost or failure to realize a return on investment or the threat of legal liability. But, still, the question arises "Do we need certification?"

For me, it has become an ethical issue. If we are a profession (and there are those who doubt it, but not me), then we need a mechanism by which that profession can be judged and held accountable for its work. There is no other profession that avoids that responsibility. The argument that certification (or licensure) is necessary only among professions whose practice potentially threatens the health and safety of society is clearly wrong. Many organizations whose members can do no real damage to health and safety have certification programs: financial planners, public relations specialists, construction managers, etc. And even if that argument were valid, clearly there are technical communicators whose work in communicating technical information has significant relation to the health and safety of the users of that information: nuclear power, high-pressure or high-heat manufacturing, etc.

The technical communication profession must be held accountable for the work that its professionals do, for it is responsible. Professional associations of technical communication cannot, ethically, take the position that they are not responsible for incompetent practice. There are more professional certifications in the US than ever before; these organizations have not found the work environment so alien to their situations. In fact, most of them eagerly seek certification as a validation of the professional work that they do. Of course, we cannot require professionals to become certified; and the likelihood of legal requirements is remote or non-existent. But any organization would not be liable, nor ethically responsible, for a professional who declined to participate - only for those who did - that is, if the organization offered a process by which the professional could become validated and by which it could fulfill its ethical and professional responsibility. Herein is the "need."

 

Conclusion

From this argument, it is clear that an objective, fair, and meaningful system of certification will greatly benefit the profession of technical communication as well as individual technical communication professionals. Any reputable profession offering service to the consuming public owes itself and its consumers the validation that an objective, fair, and meaningful certification system would bring.

And it is ethically right. Professional technical communication societies would fulfill their responsibilities to the profession by beginning the movement towards an objective, fair, and meaningful system of validation of those working in the profession.

I call upon all professional technical communication organizations to begin a broad-based, comprehensive set of actions that will move us towards much-maligned, long-awaited, and sorely needed certification of technical communication professionals.

References

Hale, Judith. (2000).

Performance-based certification: How to design a valid, defensible, cost-effective program. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Pfeiffer.

Hayman, B. (1994a, February).

Do we need to upgrade our profession? INTERCOM, 3-4, 11.

---. (1994b, July/August).

Recommendations of the ad hoc committee. Proof Sheet, 7-9. National occupational standards for technical communicators. (1999). Accreditation Version. London: Institute for Scientific and Technical Communication.

NWCET [Northwest Center for Emerging Technologies] and Regional Advanced Technology Education Consortium. [1995].

Building a foundation for tomorrow: Skill standards for information technology. Bellevue, Washington: Bellevue Community College.

SAQ/TECOM-leitfaden betriebsanleitungen. (1995). (2. Auflage).

Olten: SAQ Schweizerische Arbeitsgemeinschaft fuer Qualitaetsfoerderung und TECOM Schweizerische Gesellschaft fuer Technische Kommunikation.

"transline Deutschland - Übersetzungsdienst für technische Übersetzung"