[Sigia-l] IA Certification

[Nancy Zacks]

The certification discussion reminds me of the technical communications
industry of the mid-late 80s. With the boom in software development and
advent of the PC, lots of people wanted to be technical writers. The results
were similar to what we are seeing with IA - lots of people with different
experience and domain knowledge coming to an interdisciplinary practice.

As the practice of software development and technical communication matured,
people started talking about certification. In my opinion, the certification
efforts in the technical communications field resulted in a over-emphasis on
tools skills and somewhat of a "box-checking" mentality in hiring. To assess
a writer's temperament and problem-solving ability, you have to ask
questions that give you some idea of how he would handle a problem. For
example, how do you get information from a reluctant source or construct the
same information for multiple audiences? These are "soft" skills that don't
fit all that well into a certification framework.

I think the practice of IA today is similar to the rapid acceleration of the
technical communication profession in the 80s. Whether or not an IA is
properly matched with an IA task depends on a lot of things - the
candidate's background, the hiring manager's understanding of IA, the nature
of the project, the nature of the client.  I think "tech comm" is useful
historical precedent for not trying to certify an interdisciplinary
practice, but rather, to assure that the IA has the skills and background
for the task at hand, and that both the hiring manager and the candidate
have a "matching" concept of IA. Otherwise, box-checking hiring will give
you box-checking quality.


Nancy A. Zacks
The Precise Word, LLC
Science, Technical, and Medical Writing.
Information Design
info at preciseword.com
www.preciseword.com