Dear readers, I have just completed two terms as a director at large of the Society for Technical Communication (STC). I think those of you who are STC members deserve a review of what those four years have – and have not – accomplished.
When I first ran, I had a long list of issues that I wanted dealt with. I was going to insist that they be taken seriously, my intention was to be a real pain until the board looked at all of them. Much to my amazement, all the issues on my list got raised within the first six months of my board tenure, without my having to insist on anything! This despite the fact that from my first day, we were faced with the need to find a new Executive Director. Life on the STC board has been a series of surprises, obstacles, successes, and disappointments.
While all my issues were raised, they weren’t all completely dealt with. And new ones have come up.
The Board Never Listens, Right?
OK, let’s dispense with this one right away. Every member of every board that I have had the privilege to serve with over the last four years has been vitally interested in the good of the society – and the good of the society is the good of the members. Members are our lifeblood. So if you’re a member, and you think you’ve been ignored, I urge you to communicate that – politely, please – to the board. They really do care.
It is important, also, to mention that sometimes the assumptions – need I say presumptions – of some members, about what the board’s function is, or what they should do, is often very mistaken. And members’ communication with the board has very often been aggressive, nasty, or even downright insulting. It’s our job to take it, but it ain’t much fun.
STC is not, and never has been, a democracy
This is one of the biggest misconceptions members have about our association. The board has a legally defined fiduciary responsibility that it cannot delegate, and each member of the board is individually responsible for due diligence. Board members do not represent constituencies, they must work for the greater good of the entire organization. This is why the director/sponsor system of previous years was abandoned – it wasn’t a conspiracy on the part of a power-grabbing board, it was a requirement under law.
Members elect the board – well, about 16% of them do, the rest don’t bother to vote. But that’s as far as it goes. The board has the same status as the board of directors of any company, with the same responsibilities – and a lot fewer privileges. The board is also held to a standard of unity and solidarity. Discussions around issues can get hot and heavy inside the board, but once a vote is taken, the position voted is, and must be, the position of the entire board of directors. The only public dissent possible for board members is to resign, if they feel strongly enough about an issue that didn’t go their way. This is why incumbent board members running for re-election are often more subdued than those running for the first time – including their own first-time campaigns.
Are We Dead or Obsolete?
Let’s be honest. STC has been losing members over the years. Our membership is ageing – myself chief among them. Whatever value we do or do not provide to members, our value proposition is not speaking loudly enough to the younger generations of practitioners. Our organizational structure, the benefits we offer, our general ethos is oriented towards a generation that is retiring and will eventually die off. Cruel words, but I’m applying them to myself.
A big problem we need to face is, how can we, the old farts, create a society that will be attractive to young folks? We’re not in that generation, and we’ll never think like them, no matter how much we might like them, and seek them out. I have been honoured by two nominating committees who proposed the idea of running for Vice President to me. I turned them both down, not because I wouldn’t like doing it, but because I am convinced that I’m the wrong person to lead the society into the 21st century – even though I may be more in the vanguard of thinking than a lot of younger folks.
There is no law that says an institution must survive no matter what. If STC should become irrelevant, it would deserve to die.
Problem: Gatekeeper mentality
Until the advent of the World Wide Web, STC was almost the only place to get information about our discipline. We were the key to professional education. Today, there are a myriad of university programmes that did not exist 30 years ago, and the Web is full of useful information, free webinars, MOOCs, etc.
STC has only one thing to offer that provides an advantage over alternative educational offerings: STC’s information is verified. You don’t have to check out its accuracy, because a committee of experts has already done that. I am referring, of course, to the Body of Knowledge (BOK) that STC has been building for years. In my view, this is perhaps the biggest asset STC has to attract people, and to me, it is not enough in front of people.
My friend Larry Kunz, in a recent post, asked some probing questions about STC’s certification programme and its relationship to the BOK. As pointed out by STC’s Liz Pohland in the comments on Larry’s post, the BOK is not yet complete in all areas that are required for certification. BOK leaders, including STC board member Craig Baehr, and former board member Deanne Levander, are proactively filling in the gaps so that STC certification can use the BOK as its basis.
Certification, however, is not something that there has been a major demand for. It’s considered to be an important part of the offer of a professional association – but it still represents a form of gate keeping. Will the mobile-always-connected-always-on-everywhere generation see a need? Or will they just go around the gate?
STC needs to practice its own discipline a bit better, and become part of the nimble, “agile,” flexible, fluid information delivery that people now expect, and that many of us are producing in our jobs. That means lots of free information (webinars, for example) that acts as a calling-card for more advanced, more formalized courses that people can take on an ad-hoc basis to fill the holes in their own personal learning environments. We can’t provide one-size-fits-all training or certification and expect that everyone will flock to it – but we can take that same, highly useful, highly valuable material, and present it in ways that people really need – it’s not a great leap to do that.
Problem: Time frames
It is fashionable for my generation to criticize so-called “millennials” as entitled, selfish brats. Besides being a generalization with all the inherent weaknesses thereof, this doesn’t jive with research. Most research shows the millennial generation is vitally interested in doing good, in service, and in ethical principles, in addition to earning a good living doing something they love. The only problem for we baby-boomers is, their horizon is a lot shorter: they can’t wait years to have results, they want it in a few weeks. They form communities of interest around an issue, work for a quick result, then disband, only to form new communities of interest around new issues.
STC’s SIG structure was revised this past year via a new policy voted by the board, to facilitate this kind of process. The only problem is, our members – the ones who might want to join a SIG – are not millennials, and some of them don’t like it.
What If We Give Members What They Want – and They Disappear?
Here’s a real dilemma: we should be giving our paying members what they want. But our paying members are ageing out of the association, and we’re not attracting younger ones. If we do things that attract younger members, we risk antagonizing our existing members – you know, the ones that are keeping the lights on.
What’s a board member to do?
One day, all the members we’re pleasing so well will be gone, and so will STC. Unless we are willing to upset the apple-cart.
We’ve created a post of student/new TC liaison with the board, to try and understand better the needs of our younger members or potential members, and how to attract and retain them.
Our new executive committee is younger than we’ve had for some time, and that is also a good sign.
Can they ignite the right degree of creative disruption to change the curve? Will they? Are you, my fellow STC members, prepared to accept that this will happen?
Communicators, communicate!
Mind you, creative disruption doesn’t mean being cavalier, either with our members or with their money. We need to be transparent. In my four years on the board, we’ve made great strides towards more transparency. The Year In Review that STC CEO Chris Lyons produces with help from the staff each year is an example.
We’ve been good with the financial stuff, but we’re not communicating our motivations very well.
The danger of a relatively closed group like a board is that we forget that others, outside the board, haven’t been in on our discussions, and sometimes we forget to explain what we’ve done and why, or we only do it reactively, when someone’s got ticked off about something. We’ve had communications screw-ups that have turned assets into problems. And we’ve also had members who didn’t want to hear the explanations but just wanted to complain and accuse.
Following the dictum, “physician, heal thyself,” STC, as an organization, has to learn to both communicate, and to listen, with more sensitivity. That goes for board, staff, and members all around.
Things to be Proud Of
In my four years on the board, much has happened that I am proud of. Here are a few of them:
- We changed our vision statement to treat technical communication as a discipline, rather than trying to define it as a profession.
- With the help of CEO Chris Lyons, we have brought STC closer to financial health than it has been since the 2008 crisis, thanks to serious financial controls, cost cutting, and streamlining of processes and procurement.
- We have institutionalized the Community Affairs Committee (CAC), which acts as intermediary between communities, staff, and board, to facilitate communication and promote healthy communities in a difficult environment.
- We’ve revised the STC Summit in ways that have found favour with the public, democratizing the awards ceremonies, and providing a few highly prized new features such as speed networking.
- In the behind-the-scenes department, we have vastly improved the IT infrastructure, making it more reliable, and have been regularly updating our association management software – and cleaning it of broken customizations – so that service will be more robust. In the process, costs have also been brought down. Most members haven’t seen the results of this yet, but you will.
- We’ve migrated SIG web sites and the BOK to WordPress. Despite some technical glitches and some unfortunate miscommunication problems, maintaining these sites is now greatly simplified.
- The BOK is again being actively developed and will soon become the basis for the STC certification programme.
- We’ve created a student/new TC liaison with the board, as mentioned above.
- The board has reaffirmed STC as an international organization, with plans to develop more flexible relationships outside North America.
The International nature of STC
For many years, I have heard some voices proclaiming that STC should stick to North America and forget about maintaining communities overseas. As a long-time European resident and citizen, and a long-time STC member, including past presidency of the France chapter, I find such a view short sighted at best, suicidal at worst.
Even if your company only has offices in the United States, you are probably selling into other countries, and need to be aware of the standards, regulations, and practices of those companies in order to sell there. The fastest growing economies today are all outside North America and Europe, and we’d all be nuts to not engage with them.
I am therefore pleased that one of my last acts as a board member was to introduce a motion reaffirming our international proactive stance, a motion that was passed by the board. It reads, in part,
The STC board adopts the following policy statement on activities outside North America, and instructs the STC Chief Executive Officer and Staff to implement it.
a. STC members, wherever they live and work, currently work on products destined for countries in South America, Europe, Asia, and Oceania, and must meet the requirements of those countries. Some of our members are also located in these parts of the world.
b. In order to serve all our members who work in a global context, STC focuses on two important areas related to technical communication outside North America:
i. STC follows initiatives for legislation and regulation relative to documentation of technological products and other types of technical communication. Whenever possible, STC shall call on members on the ground in those regions for assistance and guidance in making representations to government and regulatory agencies, standards bodies, and supra-national institutions, to defend technical communications best practices and the careers of technical communicators.
ii. STC actively encourages practitioners to become members of STC, and local organisations to become affiliated with STC, wherever they might be found.
The motion goes on to develop the idea that outside North America, we develop affiliations with existing groups, or new groups formed with the intent of affiliating with STC. The idea is to reduce international bureaucracy, and to reduce staff overhead while encouraging STC activity outside the North American continent in a proactive manner.
I urge all of you to hold the board, of which I am no longer a member, accountable for this, and for other actions that will bring STC into renewed growth, energy, and creativity.
Rant of a Humanist Nerd 
Ray–thank you for sharing your perspective and providing a glimpse into the hearts and minds of the board members. (I treasure the two years I spend working with you there and I’ve been excited to see the CAC continuing to work with communities.)
Ben
Ben, thanks for the kind words. I hope we’ve all been useful in our service.
Great article! I’m a member of the old-timers’, baby boomer generation of STC members, and I’ve become quite disengaged with the Society over the years. I pay my dues every year, but that’s about it. It’s great to know that the Society is working hard to stay relevant and to attract younger members. As you’ve said, without them, the Society will die. Thank you!
Thanks for the insights that you provided with this article. As part of that aging group of STC members, I’m happy to see initiatives to bring in younger members. And I’m very much in favor of remaining an international organization. We get entries in our Washington DC-Baltimore chapter competition from abroad every year, and it is rewarding to be in touch with writers outside of the U.S.
I get the attract younger members thing, but the more I think about it, the more it seems like opening up the Elks Lodge to beat poets. They are no doubt grateful for the offer, but that does not make it a form of organization that appeals to their sensibilities.
It may not, in the end, be a matter of programs and services but of the structure of the organization itself. And getting the structure of an organization to change requires asking everyone in a position to make the change to saw off the branch they are sitting on. It is just so much easier to walk away and build something new.
Mark, you might be right – and in that case, STC will probably fade away. But institutions also reinvent themselves, often with enormous success. Two examples: The Gap, and Nokia.
I think the transformation STC needs to undertake is rather less drastic than moving from rubber galoshes to mobile telephony.
WAKE UP EVERYONE STC is now all smoke and mirrors. In the past 3+ years our membership has continued to decline, our investments dwindled and for all we know are spent, our income has dropped by over 30%+, we are in debt and we are only cutting staff to make ends meet, so in essence we are broke! Look at our IRS forms online and financials. What new programs? What new initiatives? What new revenue streams? The Executive Director has done what for us, fire employees?? Our website has been screwed up for months?? We have a board that has no clue on how to run a business, nor what to do to turn this around and this has been the theme for the past few years. Where is a good bankruptcy attorney when you need one? Mark Baker hit the nail on the head, and Ray is clearly clueless as this Society is BROKE and out of touch with reality and its members! The SIGS are better at this than STC!
Besides the fact that a good part of what you say is simply untrue, where are your CONSTRUCTIVE ideas to make things better? Why don’t you get yourself elected to the board and show them how it’s done?
Pot shots are easy, so is complaining. Improvement takes hard work and I’ve neither time nor patience for anyone who takes shots from the side without doing any of the real work.
Ray,
The facts are the facts. Take the time, review the public IRS tax filings as I did, look at the internal financial filings reported to us and there is no doubt that STC is BROKE! As you/others clearly outlined, it cannot nor it will not ever be fixed under the current management/board structure. The lack of new initiatives in the last 5+ years, a HUGE drop in membership, (in the hundreds each year), multiple Executive Directors, and a web site that was inoperable for over 5 months, and compensation of allegedly key employees in gross excess of what is warranted for an organization of this size clearly substantiate a poorly run organization. Even you tried, with your wonderfully altruistic view and failed miserably. This organization needs to be put out of its misery and that is from a factual business position. It is only misleading its members!
Scott, “the facts are the facts” and yours are not facts. Two examples of simple untruths in your posts:
“our investments dwindled”
Not only have I read the 990 forms, I have been reading monthly financials on STC for the last four years – far more detailed than the 990 forms that are published. The first thing I can tell you is that when I left the board last May, STC and INCREASED its investments for the first time in several years.
“compensation of allegedly key employees in gross excess of what is warranted for an organization of this size”
Sorry, this is your fantasy. Research what other associations of our size pay their employees and you’ll see that we are in the middle. In fact, some staff turnover has been due to the fact that good employees have found better paying jobs at other associations.
“we are in debt and we are only cutting staff to make ends meet, so in essence we are broke!”… “The Executive Director has done what for us, fire employees?? ”
Where on earth did you get this? An executive director has a duty to fire an employee if s/he is incompetent or violates law, the association’s ethical principles, or confidentiality. I can recall only two such occurrences in my time on the board, completely necessary and justified. Our expenses have been lowered by PRUDENT MANAGEMENT for which the executive director is to be complimented. We are far from broke, even if our finances are not yet as stable as they should be. STC’s operating deficit, from which we have been recovering since the financial crisis of 2008, was much lower than budgeted for 2015. In other words, STC’s financial health has rarely been better in the last 15 years.
“multiple Executive Directors”
I joined STC in 1998. In that time, there have been three executive directors, and one interim person filling that role during the search for a replacement. Does that seem like a lot to you?
“What new programs? What new initiatives?”
Clearly you’re not looking, or don’t want to know – I’m not going to start enumerating them, it’s a waste of time and breath.
In fact, why are you even commenting now on a post from last June? I wouldn’t have bothered answering, except I couldn’t let readers believe that any of what you say is even remotely true. Come to think of it, I’m not sure you read my original post very carefully, or you wouldn’t even have made some of these statements.
If you have some axe to grind, please go do it somewhere else. Otherwise, I repeat my earlier question: WHERE ARE YOUR CONSTRUCTIVE SUGGESTIONS TO MAKE IT BETTER?
If you don’t have any, please get out of the way of the folks who are working hard, seriously, and at their own expense to improve our society. I’ve not one more second of time for your harangues.
Hi Ray,
Thank you for this article. I’m one of those Millennials who is trying to break further into Technical Writing, and was hunting for certification options when I stumbled over the STC site. Here are a few thoughts:
I just completed my ITIL Foundation certification. One time fee, no membership required, and it’s lifelong. Maintenance isn’t a requirement. The issue that I and others have with membership and CEU requirements is that, if we’ve completed a certification, we should not have to continually pay for it. It should be one or the other: CEU’s required for maintenance (preferred), OR a continual membership fee.
It’s pricey! Forking out $150+/year just to maintain a certification is outrageous to many millennials; if we can’t afford to buy homes, how are we going to afford maintenance on a certification that we don’t even technically NEED to become Technical Writers? Why do this when we can get certification in other areas of the IT world for substantially less and not have to continually pay to maintain it?
Reading the coursework, it sounds like the CPTC certification would be a fantastic fit for what I’m looking for, but I can’t bring myself to commit to seminars/CTUs/yearly fees for that certification when I can get a lifelong Technical Writing certification from a community college for a few extra dollars, and not have to renew it yearly.
It makes me kind of sad because while I would love to get the STC certification for CPTC, I can’t bring myself to make an investment like that. I’ve printed out the CPTC Study Guide and am purchasing a copy of the book required for the course, will self-study, and take that knowledge with me, but until STC can fix the structure of their certifications and membership, I and many other millennials can’t bring ourselves to invest in this.
I hope this has been a little bit insightful, from a fledgling Technical Writer to a veteran.
Hi Megan,
Thank you for your frank and thoughtful comment. I am no longer on the board, or directly involved in STC affairs, and some things have changed since I wrote the article in 2016, but I can comment on a few things.
A certificate, diploma, or degree has a different function than professional certification. The Wikipedia article on ITIL states, directly, “Certification in ITIL is only available to individuals and relates to their knowledge of the 5 books.” Such certification is not, as you say, “a lifelong certification,” but rather a one-time certification. It says that you were competent at the time you took the exam. But our world is in constant disruption.
STC’s certification programme is not only about acquiring knowledge, it’s about demonstrating professional practice, and maintaining oneself as up to date in a discipline that is constantly evolving.
Now, there is a valid question that goes, “What do I need it for?”
I personally don’t need it, and you might not, either. STC’s intent is to have its certification become a reference, something employers might be asking for – so that you could get the kind of job that would enable you to buy that house. If you already have an established reputation in the field, you probably don’t want to spend your money on certification. If you don’t, it could actually be an excellent investment – once that status of reference is achieved.
My understanding today is that some employers are already demanding, and/or paying a premium for, STC certified tech comms. Is it the majority? No, and maybe it never will be, but only time will tell.
The practice of renewing certification by maintaining oneself with ongoing, lifelong learning, is merely good sense, but it’s also a common practice for other professional certifications. If you are a chartered accountant, your certification is obligatory, and its maintenance requires continuing study. You can’t practice without it. Technical communication is not a regulated profession, so certification is optional – but it might become de facto required in some other moment.
You might also want to take a look at another TC certification programme, that of TEKOM Europe, which offers two levels of certification. Their professional level is here: https://www.technical-writing-training-and-certification.com/training/tctrain-professional-course/
They want to sell training to people, and if you buy their training, you can get certified by them. I am not sure if there are maintenance fees/requirements in their scheme. There are also masters programmes in Technical Communication in Europe that have agreements with TC Train Net where students take the TEKOM course plus additional courses furnished by the university, and graduate with both a masters and a professional certification. European universities have also developed a framework for technical communication training that has been adopted by many universities offering programmes in the field – closely aligned to, but not identical with, the TEKOM certification.
STC would like to do something similar, initially in North American contexts, but the university community in the U.S. has been generally suspicious of any private certification scheme, and has not been welcoming of STC overtures, at least not during the time I was involved.
As for STC’s membership structure, and how it relates to certification, I have been of the opinion for a long time that STC’s membership structure needed a major overhaul. The UK’s ISTC has different membership levels that are tied to certification steps, and might provide one way to do what you seem to propose. In general, however, most TC organisations treat membership and certification as separate items.
I hope these reflections have also been helpful. I would just end with a note that Technical Communication is not an IT profession. It’s a humanist profession, closer to journalism than to IT. We don’t, in general, DO a lot of technology (though that, too, is changing), technology is rather our subject matter. The reason certification comes up is that, although it is a humanist profession, it has fairly rigorous requirements that need to be met in order to show basic competence. In other words, like many 21st century professions, it is cross disciplinary, transmedia, and gloriously exciting and interesting.
Thank you so much for replying! Your points are absolutely valid; most Millennials such as myself (that I know, anyway; I can’t vouch for all) are using Technical Communication and Technical Writing in the IT field, so I see where my misconception sprung from. We’re seeing TW as an alternative to expensive college degrees as a way to gain an edge in a very competitive market.
The information that training through STC provides is quite valuable; I do think it’d be worth it for the board to consider offering a one-time certification in addition to the rest of their catalogue. While it won’t continually bring in funds for STC, it may open doors for them to gain more traffic.
Thanks again for speaking with me, this has been illuminating.