atw: Accreditation: what is important, right now?

Hi Brian,

I appreciate the careful thought and experience you are offering in this
argument, but it all comes down to this: currently we have nothing to offer
in the way of accreditation or ranking. We can't even agree among ourselves.
It's been discussed and attempted many times, but never got past first base.
Typically it runs off the rails when people start talking about formal tech
writer qualification (this will *never* happen due to the diversity of
skills and activities, but the debate just won't go away).

Why would we want to embark on a year of work to achieve all of those
outcomes, with no possibility of concluding the process?

As to the proposed approach being "at my peril", the risks are less than
accepting the current status quo where my skills are devalued unless they
were employed by a company that is familiar to the recruiter (specialist
recruiters sometimes excepted). The worst case is that we ratify the
document and nobody takes any notice. I seen no peril in that scenario. If
nothing else it will have engaged the fraternity in consideration of what we
think is important.

This is not something that happened in the last few years. Tech writing has
been going through a progressive "dumbing down" for 20+ years. My guess is
that it results from the increase of outsourcing and resultant influence of
recruiters as gatekeepers. Also the emergence of software tech writing has
had an effect, due to the ubiquity of ritualised low-skill screen-capture
procedure-style writing. But who cares? That kind of thing is a legitimate
role, it just needs to be differentiated from high-value expert activities.
Currently there is no framework to do this.

To a certain extent all of this only has passing interest to me: my personal
priority it to not be a technical writer any more. Not under the current
recruiter-imposed definition of it, anyway. But is saddens me that folks
who've become tech writers lately won't realise that it hasn't always been
this way.

cheers

Colin Dawson
Info Action Pty Ltd
P +612 9674 7025
F +612 9620 8441
www.info-action.com.au

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