communication department

By Thomas Barker, Manager, STC Academic Community, and Hillary Hart, Chair, Academic-Industry Collaborations

For STC to remain a strong organization supportive of all its members, academics and industry/government practitioners must collaborate and pool resources. Important initiatives, such as a possible body-of-knowledge project, would require the cooperation of both groups. As the Society adjusts to the realities of a global marketplace and to an expanded definition of technical writer as technical communicator, what time is better than the present for leading academics and practitioners to discuss ways of strengthening STC?

This past September, members of the STC Board, the STC office, and thirty STC leaders-half from industry and half from academia-met in Houston, Texas, to address some of the most important concerns of the organization, brainstorm strategies for academe-industry collaboration, and ensure the professional success of future technical communicators. Five subcommittees that had gathered information over the summer reported results in five key areas of cooperation. The suggestions below have been communicated to the Board, which will decide what should be implemented when.

1. Academe-Industry Connections

Participants in the Academe-Industry Leaders' Summit wanted to look at new ways the Society can foster and encourage connections between universities and the workplace. The first questions they considered were these:

• How can STC, academe, and industry work together to strengthen support for entering professionals?
• How can academic members help industry/government members involve themselves in academic programs and ensure that they will receive maximum benefits from those programs?

The STC Strategic Plan has already been revised to include more emphasis on support for students. This support could take many forms. For instance, chapters could gain credit for Community Achievement Awards by reaching out to academic and student communities. Another form of support could come from the Leadership Community Resource, which could encourage chapters to inform local academic communities of their activities.

As for encouraging industry members to become involved with academic programs, summit attendees resoundingly endorsed the marketing of available collaboration opportunities in the larger community. These opportunities might include exchange programs, whereby academics could work within industry or government on project teams for three to six months while their counterparts taught classes at a university. Because these collaborations need infrastructure support, the group recommended creating an industry-academe database. The availability of collaboration opportunities in this database would encourage industry and government practitioners to become involved in research, internships, and program advisory boards. And finally, the group recommended that STC publicize its existing academic database of university technical communication programs (www.stc.org/academic/index.aspx) to the professional community and our own membership.

2. Job Skills and Needs

In the area of job skills and needs, the leaders at the summit asked these questions:

• What do hiring managers really want: short-term skills such as tools expertise, long-term assets such as business knowledge and leadership skills, or both?
• What do practitioners wish academics knew? What basic and more advanced competencies would they like to see in graduates of technical communication programs? Who might teach/train to these competencies?

Both communities-academe and industry/government-share the job of developing the entering professional of the future: the academic sphere contributes theoretical, critical thinking and the value of a well-rounded education, and the workplace provides training and on-the-job experience. STC and its interested committees could explore the following opportunities for more collaboration:

• Facilitate industry internships and mentoring for faculty and students.
• Develop an open-source toolkit with vendors.
• Help managers analyze their needs.
• Hold a Student Day at STC's annual conference, with coaching opportunities, resume-writing and interviewing workshops, and plenty of opportunities to interact with companies.

3. STC Support for Academe/Faculty/Students

STC's Strategic Plan positions the organization as the primary source for education and professional support for technical communicators worldwide. So it was natural for those at the Academe-Industry Leaders' Summit to ask these questions:

• How can STC help grow its student and teacher memberships?
• How can STC best support educational programs and facilitate involvement of industry-practitioner expertise in their design and development?

The leaders at the summit looked at a number of initiatives that support STC members: STC's Live Web Seminars on current topics, the Corporate Value Program, and various membership-level innovations. Discussion focused on how these programs can be made available and useful for academic and student members. Following the model of the current student volunteer program at the annual conference (whereby students help conference staff and attend sessions for free), the group brainstormed ways to seek corporate sponsors for travel, lodging, and meals for students-especially those who have won awards-to attend the annual conference. The group also suggested setting up a scholarships database and a mentoring database and making them part of a section of the STC Web site devoted to students. Finally, summit attendees adopted the goal of getting more international students and faculty involved in STC.

4. Research and Its Integration into Teaching and the Workplace

Research by both academic and industry practitioners is key to the extension of the profession's knowledge base. Leaders at the summit looked at the sorts of research questions that practitioners need addressed, and those that academics need to pursue:

• How can academic research benefit practitioners?
• What kinds of pedagogical research questions should be explored in a practitioner context?
• What contributions to basic research can be expected of practicing professionals?

Discussions of these questions fell into two broad areas: how we do research and how we share research. STC is poised to support the membership in a healthy exchange of questions, methodologies, and results. The summit leaders had these recommendations:

• Require academe-industry collaboration in STC-funded research projects.
• Encourage practitioners and academics to participate in each other's research by setting up a resource and opportunity database to include research internships, usability testing (sharing facilities and expertise), industry consulting contracts with professors, participation in and observation of workplace research, and academic contribution to publicizing results.
• Academic community members: disseminate research findings by creating short abstracts of research and periodic summaries of research conclusions.
• Practitioners: disseminate reports of workplace studies.

Leaders also urged STC to consider how research is integrated into the annual conference. One possibility is to eliminate "research" as a separate track or stem and, instead, encourage inclusion of research conclusions and best practices in most papers and presentations.

The newly formed Task Force on STC Publications may be able to help in the sharing aspect of research, as members of that group will make recommendations (in 2008) about ways STC can "extend the knowledge making" to reach more members and draw them into the enterprise of establishing a much-needed body of knowledge in technical communication.

5. Defining a Body of Knowledge

Perhaps the most exciting topic addressed at the Academe-Industry Leaders' Summit was the challenging project of identifying a body of knowledge for the profession of technical communication. (A body of knowledge, as defined by Wikipedia, is "a term used to represent the sum total of all knowledge in an area expertise, most notably professional bodies . . . usually made up of knowledge areas that represent a taxonomy of relevant concepts.") Attendees addressed these questions:

• How can academic and industry practitioners collaborate with STC to begin defining the body of knowledge for our field?
• How have other professional associations approached this process?

While the summit participants realize that the STC Board will vote on any initiative proposed at the summit, including a body-of-knowledge project, they concluded that there is broad support for setting up a system whereby categories of knowledge and best practices can be organized in a way that benefits all members. Whether the technical communication body of knowledge is best developed via a wiki-like framework, surveys of literature in the field, or some other means, stay tuned for a call for volunteers willing to help formalize the areas of knowledge in our profession.

Ready for the Challenge

For those Society leaders attending the Academe-Industry Leaders' Summit, the day was one of intense discussion and exchange of ideas. As our profession-made up of both academic and industry practitioners-readies itself for the challenges of globalization, increased professionalism, expanded work capabilities, and growing educational needs, we can take heart in the willingness of Society leaders to consider how to fill the needs of members of all our communities and listen to the voices of students, managers, writers, illustrators, professors, usability specialists, editors, consultants, and the many other professionals who make up STC.