I was cleaning out a box of stuff that had been shoved in the back corner of a closet after I changed jobs, and ran across some old print issues of Imprints. One issue from 2003 caught my attention because of comment that Rahel Ann Baillie (the then-STC Director/Sponsor Region 7) made:
Chapter meeting attendance has been down and the popularity of technical presentations has decreased, while the popularity of career cafes and career management days has increased. In any conversation between three technical communicators, at least one is unemployed, about to be unemployed, or thinking about a career change.
The more things change, the more it feels like they stay the same.
In 2008, chapter meeting attendance is down again, and try as we might, we can’t seem to elicit comments and suggestions from chapter membership. We have more than 80 members in the chapter, and we see a small subset turning out for meetings, opening newsletters and event announcements, or trafficking this blog.
It’s possible some of these members enroll in the STC purely for SIGs that they rely on. Others may do so for society-level offerings like publications, job banks, and the like. Some on the listservs have commented that some likely are paying the membership dues simply for a bullet point on their resume and/or a business expense deduction for their self-employment taxes.
We don’t know what the case is in this chapter. I know some writers in the UTC companies have commented that the work they do is so specialized, structured, and governed by military standards that they can’t relate to the subjects of most STC meetings and Webinars — and aren’t sure they have any knowledge to share with the rest of the membership (I disagree). The few writers I’ve met from Pfizer say they’re not entirely sure if what they do is “technical writing” and that they spend their dollars on memberships to organizations that specialize in medical and scientific writing.
On an STC Forum discussion thread, Eddie McHam offered some perspective on his own continuing membership (and declining participation):
The trend is that my career morphed from writing manuals for military vehicles in WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS to developing Windows Help files in RoboHelp Office to building simple websites in HTML to (now) learning graphic design and advanced interactive multimedia/audio/video. As this evolution progressed, it seems that the relevance of STC activities in my area has somewhat proportionately diminished ~ or perhaps the other way around: maybe my job skills and titles have grown progressively irrelevant to STC activities. I’m not entirely sure which is more accurate. … to be perfectly honest, I no longer consider myself a technical writer because that accounts for probably less than 5% of my job. … I think I can count on one hand the number of local STC chapter meetings I’ve attended in the 2+ years I’ve been here. The local chapter’s leadership is doing a great job; I’m sure the topics they present are useful and beneficial to many tech writers and content developers. But those topics no longer relate to me the way they once did. Combine with my already tight schedule ~ work, church, and web-related meetings and activities ~ and you have the primary reasons for my admittedly drastically reduced STC involvement. It is no one’s fault, and I am at a loss as to ideas for addressing this.
I’m wondering how many of our chapter members feel their career evolution has had the same effect on their participation?
