The specialist will work in a team environment writing and responding to multi-product proposals in response to client requests for commercial card services. The team works within stringent time frames to meet proposal deadlines and must ensure the final documents are complete, well organized, and professionally presented. This position involves significant interaction with members of the sales team and communication with senior managers. Management of multiple overlapping projects and deadlines is required. The position also requires a high degree of self-motivation as well as the ability to work alone and on a team.

Responsibilities
• Co-develops strategic proposals with sales team executives and client servicing professionals to win new business
• Develops proposals for business opportunities and responds to client questionnaires including researching and writing responses
• Works closely with stakeholders to develop responses that convey a unique strategy for the client
• Ensures a smooth flow of information and consistent messaging by proofing, editing, and rewriting all sections of the document as required
• Participates in strategy, status, and follow-up meetings on bids
• Prioritizes project writing assignments and coordinates the flow of information from various department contributors to ensure that all deadlines are met
• Receives direct supervision, and review of work occurs at frequent intervals
• As the job involves preparing materials for clients, overtime is occasionally required
Qualifications
• A bachelor’s degree (liberal arts degree preferred) or equivalent work experience
• Approximately 3-5 years of relevant work experience; communications or business writing experience
• Ability to coordinate multiple projects and initiatives at one time
• Must have demonstrated project management experience
• Superior written communication skills
• Strong knowledge of Microsoft Word required
• Ability to work well under pressure and time constraints
• Must be a self-motivator who works well independently and in a team environment
• Strong research and problem-solving skills as well as a collaborative attitude
• Knowledge of the financial industry is a plus

Interested candidates can email Dawn Holder at dawn.holder(at)jpmchase(dot)com.

As a Technical Writer, you will be responsible for providing high-quality documentation support across a wide variety of products, applications, and lines of business. Superior writing and communication skills will be used to provide business and technical colleagues with business plans, technical and functional specifications, system design documents, user guides and training materials. Working with the technical staff, you will produce installation and set-up guides and quick reference guides that our service teams depend on for accurate information. In addition, you will be a primary contact for our learning and development teams, working with them to prepare appropriate training scenarios, reference manuals, and guides.

Qualifications
• Experience with MS Project or other Gantt charting/project management software and Photoshop is required.
• Experience with Adobe CS3 and Technical Communicator Suite, including InDesign, Acrobat Professional, Captivate, RoboHelp and FrameMaker is preferred.
• Strong analytical skills and the ability to develop processes and procedures to improve efficiencies.
• Strong project management skills, including the ability to plan and prioritize multiple projects.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

Interested candidates can email Dawn Holder at dawn.holder(at)jpmchase(dot)com.

Last year, I was the incoming Intermountain Chapter president. I missed the beginning of Leadership Day where then-president Mark Clifford took the chapter presidents and SIG managers aside and dropped the bomb labeled “$1.2 million shortfall.” The rest of Leadership Day, most of which I attended, held a tense atmostphere. People were upset and probably panicking to some degree. I felt somewhat overwhelmed as a new chapter president stepping into office and being handed these problems.

I wouldn’t say that I doubted the Society board over the following twelve months, but I tried to voice my concerns where members of the board would hear them. I admit that my dissatisfaction with the board stemmed from a perception that they weren’t open and transparent enough. They solicited ideas from all members, but I didn’t see much communication back that described which ideas the board was discussing. I wasn’t alone on this.

This year, the proceedings of Leadership Day left me with a feeling of greater confidence in STC and its board. I believe that STC is moving forward with more strength and a clearer vision. We still have problems to solve and obstacles to remove, but I believe the board has made huge strides. I’ll tell you about four things that are reassuring for me.

Recommendations from the Community Support and Funding Task Force

Hillary Hart, now vice president of STC, assembled a task force with leaders of communities from all size categories. I had the opportunity to join but didn’t think I could give it the time it would deserve. But the task force surveyed members and made recommendations for board consideration that would boost the support that chapters receive and improve members’ perceptions of the organization and board.

The main recommendations that I support are:

• STC should position itself as the place to go for employers to find technical communicators.
• STC should position itself as the place to go for training on how to write technical papers and how to write technical presentations.
• STC should create a marketing committee to promote STC.

Having been told by chapter members who declined to renew membership this year that STC’s value level didn’t justify the cost, I felt strongly enough about these items that I stood up at an audience microphone and thanked the task force for their work and their recommendations. I think if acted on, these recommendations will significantly increase STC’s importance.

Certification

Cindy Currie announced that the board approved a plan for a work-based certification program with a revised plan due in June. Instead of having to pass an exam, practitioners in the field of tech comm can submit work to be critiqued in six areas. I wonder what this means for communicators who deliver proprietary, private, or sensitive information and will be finding out before the conference is over.

Still, this provides technical communicators with the opportunity to obtain credentials in the profession. As a result, employers will have this specific standard against which to judge candidates and know that someone who has been certified by STC has certain skills.

Marketing Committee

Of course, if employers continue to lack understanding of technical communicators, our skill sets, and why we’re important, they won’t care about our credentials. The task force recommended a marketing committee be formed, and this made perfect sense to me. Chapters have a PR manager position, so why isn’t there such a thing at the Society level?

Mike Hughes wrapped up Leadership Day with a preview of his speech for the annual business meeting the next evening, and he told us that he had already begun forming a marketing committee. This group will focus on making sure employers know who STC is and who technical communicators are.

Transparency and Building Trust

In his closing comments, Mike also told us that one of his emphases as president of the Society will be for the board to open up to the members a lot more. Mike wrote on his personal blog about struggles the board faced, and I think doing so increased his credibility because people could see that the board is composed of real people who wrestle with real problems, and it wasn’t their intent to force a policy or procedure on people. Mike’s posting about it didn’t hurt the board’s image in my mind.

Mike wants members of the board to speak more openly about their deliberations so that members of the Society can become engaged and offer input early—of course with the caveat that we will be listened to, but our ideas may not be acted on. But that openness and encouragement of conversation will help to build the trust that many members lost over the last year.

Wrap-Up

I believe that having made it through the financial crisis, STC can make big strides toward being what it should and being the gathering place for technical communicators of all varieties. It’s encouraging to have received confirmation that Mike and the rest of the board see our problems and want to engage in more open communication with the rest of the members.

When I renewed at the beginning of the year, I was giving the board a year to show me what they would do. After what happened on Leadership Day, I expect I’ll be renewing my membership again in 2011.

Cross-posted at http://gryphonmountain.net.

Check it out here: http://www.iconfitness.com/employment/view/377.

What values, traits, and  experiences do you bring to the office?

I have served as chapter treasurer for 2 years. I worked closely with the STC office to process and move forward with the zero-budgeting reports and have worked hard to keep chapter costs at a minimum.

What is the most important challenge or issue you see facing the chapter, and what possible actions or solutions do you see?

Reductions in memberships and lack of renewals have caused concern among the current board. We have worked tirelessly to create programming that appeals to our membership. We plan to continue to offer a variety of program options for our members going forward.

STC Service, awards, and honors:

 Past president, Competitions Manager, Programming Coordinator

Education and other (non-STC) professional affiliations, awards, and honors:

Bachelor Degree in English Composition from Brigham Young University. I teach composition and technical writing classes at Utah Valley University.

Professional Experience

I am a veteran technical communicator with experience as a writer, editor, trainer, course developer, usability specialist, and project manager/team lead. I have worked for Novell, THIINK Subscription, Legato/EMC, and Quest Software.

Additional Comments

I am committed to keeping our Intermountain Chapter going. The upcoming STC year holds great promise. I believe having a viable, active chapter is the goal of every member of our board.

If you feel, though, that your voice isn’t being heard or that you can provide guidance for the chapter’s program, becoming an officer will give you a chance for frequent and direct input into what the chapter offers. You will also be able to interact with some very talented and enthusiastic people, just as I have.

To run for a position, fill out and submit the Candidate Election Form.

Elections will proceed on the following schedule:

• Sunday, Feb 28: Deadline for sending in your Candidate Election Form.  The Nominating Committee selects candidates.
• Saturday, March 6: The Nominating Committee announces candidates. Voting opens.
• Monday, March 22: Voting ends. 
• April: Results announced at the chapter event. (More information coming.)

For information about positions, see the Chapter Leaders page. Feel free to contact any of the current officers to ask questions about their positions.

I again invite you to run for office, join a great group of officers, and help guide the chapter’s direction in 2010 and 2011.

Note: The overall STC organization’s election process is also proceeding. See schedule and candidate information.

This is a contingent position lasting up to 12 months.  No relocation assistance is available.  There is a possibility of renewal and/or conversion to regular employment.

Apply online for this position.

Announcement on the STC's Notebook blog about the dues increase for 2010

Last month, STC announced a dues increase, a measure that the officers and staff had been promising since they had to take a good hard look at how to stay afloat. When announcing this change on STC’s blog, STC President Cindy Currie said:

STC spends, on average, just under $250 to provide services to a member, yet dues rates have been well below that amount. As I mentioned earlier, for several years the revenue generated by the annual conference and our earnings from invested reserves have covered the difference—until now. We need to change our business model and adopt a pay-as-you-go approach.

In 2010, dues will cover basic member benefits with a la carte pricing for additional features. The core benefits remain, but with some changes. Basic dues do not include membership in a chapter and SIG. You are encouraged to take advantage of the many local and virtual benefits offered by chapters and SIGs by purchasing a la carte membership for $25 USD and $10 USD, respectively. All members will receive the electronic version of our publications. Print subscriptions to Intercom and Technical Communication are available for $30 USD and $75 USD respectively. The 2010 membership fees, approved by the Board of Directors, are:

Basic Membership         $215 USD
Students                        $ 75 USD
Retirees                        $145 USD

This means that if you pay for basic membership and add one chapter and SIG membership, you’re paying $250, a $75 increase over last year. To get print copies of Intercom and Technical Communication, you’ll pay $355, double the amount it cost for 2009 for equivalent benefits.

A Hard Hit

This is bad news for many STC members. A number of Intermountain Chapter members are self-employed, freelancers, university or college faculty, or unemployed, and this kind of expense can be hard to justify. Because employers have been cutting back expenses, many no longer sponsor STC memberships for their employees. It has been pointed out that with the current state of the economy, now was the worst time for STC to raise dues so drastically; the irony is that it was the state of the economy that caused STC to take a close look at the weak aspects of its financial model.

Tom Johnson, our Web committee manager, recently sent out a link to a brief survey to the chapter listserv, asking if members of the chapter plan to renew and why. If you haven’t yet, please take the survey. As of this writing, 46 out of about 80 chapter members have responded.

Thanks to those who discussed the dues increase on the listserv. Your views have given me a picture of how problematic the dues increase is for our chapter.

Some Frankness from the President

To be honest, I’m disappointed about the dues increase. I voiced my concern as well that eliminating the pass-through funds from STC from the dues of our members would cause problems for small chapters like ours. This has been a frustrating and troubling process to watch.

From what members of the chapter have said, a major concern is that STC’s offerings don’t justify the dues. For many, the benefits from the parent organization don’t add up. When people spend a couple hundred dollars on something, they expect some cold, hard returns, and rightly so. The fact is that if the benefits are apparent and substantial enough, then the cost is less of an issue. The problem is that the current benefits aren’t substantial enough for a number of members.

Our chapter isn’t the only one that is struggling with this problem. Many chapter presidents are concerned about loss of membership, projected and real.

What I Ask of You

While many of you will not be renewing your STC membership, I ask you to stick with the Intermountain Chapter. Our goal for this year has been to provide relevant events, but due to some of the feedback we’ve received, we’ve met with mixed success in the last several months. We have more people attending our events than last year, but we can certainly do better. I encourage you to continually provide us with feedback and suggestions, whether you’re an STC member or not.

I have heard some concern over STC’s seemingly offhand prediction that 40% of members will not renew. While that many or more of Intermountain’s members may not renew, you are still welcomed and encouraged to participate in our chapter’s functions. Whatever the parent organization’s view of this loss is, I don’t look at you as an expected casualty. We need each of you.

I see the Intermountain Chapter taking the role of sponsor of tech comm–related activities in our area. We do charge non-STC-members for some events, but we plan to do so only when it’s necessary to sustain the activities, and we’ll keep that cost as low as possible. We hold students and members of sister organizations at the same level as STC members when it comes to cost of events.

The chapter officers are working out our plan for our 2010 events, but they are by no means set in stone. Your input is valuable to us. The Intermountain Chapter can be a means of keeping the tech comm community together at this point.

If you can renew with STC, please do so. The officers and staff have had to get past the initial problem of the cash shortfall; now that that danger seems to be behind STC for 2009, your dues are still needed for 2010. Many voices have contributed ideas to what STC can offer, and I hope that if we stick around and give STC our support, we will see some great things happen over the next year that will assure us that our dues were well spent.

To those who can’t renew, please stay subscribed to the listserv and this website, and participate as much as you can. You are part of our community even if you’re not on the STC membership roster.

Wrap-up

The dues increase is hard to swallow. We can all probably think of something else we can do with $250 or $350. I completely understand if you have weighed the cost against the benefits and decided that STC membership isn’t what you need in 2010. That’s a decision each person has to make. I hope you will continue to participate and give the officers input.

Right now, it’s anyone’s guess where STC will be a year from now. The international officers and staff have done a lot of work to get STC out of the position it was in back in May, but there is much to be done still to help all members feel that what they get from STC they can’t get anywhere else. Many brilliant and experienced people are talking, and we hope that this turns into brilliant action.

Just remember that whether you renew or not for 2010, the Intermountain Chapter can be your technical communication community.

Members listen intently as Joe talks about the skills managers and HR departments should be asking for.

On Thursday, September 17th, members of the chapter met for some food and discussion about issues affecting technical communicators. The main topics were the job market and how students can prepare themselves for the profession. We also talked briefly about what brings people to STC. This post shares some of the thoughts and ideas given during the discussion.

The Job Market

This is an issue on many of our minds, and this topic was brought up by an educator wanting to know what to tell her students.

One member said that as an independent consultant and contractor, she uses the number of job postings per day is an indicator of how well the economy is doing as a whole, since technical communicators are often hired last and let go first. Currently, Monster.com has four to six postings for technical writing–related jobs.

Postings often ask for three to four years of experience minimum. One person asked how critical these numbers are to hiring managers. A technical writing manager present told us that for him, if the team is small, he values senior technical writers (minimum five years of experience) because he needs people who can get going quickly after being hired. The five years of experience was a must.

However, many managers and HR departments don’t know what’s important in a technical writer. They ask for knowledge of specific software, which can be learned in relatively short time, instead of skills in project management, problem solving, and audience analysis, which aren’t as easy to learn. Being able to be trustworthy with the customer and get answers is also essential.

When managers and customers don’t really know what they want in a technical writer and the deliverables, it’s up to the tech writers they already work with to educate them one on one. We can’t make a big change in perspective all at once.

These days, someone pointed out, it’s important to be willing to reinvent yourself, or you may not be able to find a job. The profession is changing, and we need to keep up with it. STC can be a way to help technical communicators and educators stay on top of changes.

Note: E-Learning and the Science of Instruction by Ruth Colvin Clark and Richard E. Mayer was mentioned as a resource for learning to analyze the audience and planning materials to meet their needs.

How Students Can Prepare

One way is to follow the instructions when applying for a job! If it asks for a cover letter, to email the application, or anything else, do exactly that. Those who don’t follow the instructions are the first to be passed over, no matter how appealing their qualifications may be (because their qualifications aren’t even seen).

It was suggested that tech comm educators look for opportunities within their schools for internships. For example, a professor at Utah State University arranged a technical editing internship with the engineering program so that technical writing students could work with engineering students on their proposals and project plans to give them a more professional quality. Tech writing students need these internships to answer the “how to get experience” problem.

Students should also not think “I’m done” when they walk out the door of the university or college. Always keep learning and sharpening your skills. This is also important if your career shifts and different things are expected of you over time than when you began the job.

Students can work on open-source projects, such as those at the wiki at http://tech.lds.org. This gives real-world experience working with project managers, developers, and testers.

They should develop the skills mentioned above, such as project management and audience analysis, as much as they can. Technical communicators often have to work as project managers as they plan and produce their deliverables.

Bringing People to STC

One of the reasons people come to STC is for continuing education, particularly while interacting with the chapter. Meeting with chapter members is a reality check—it allows us to see what other people’s experiences and knowledge are.

One member said in the two STC Summits he attended, he got more out of the day of classes than out of the presentations, so providing training would be helpful. STC also provides a way to continue learning through the members who are experts in the field.

SIG listservs provide a great resource for members when they are active.

September board meeting conference call

October Event

Marj, our programs coordinator, is chasing this one and will have more information for us as she hears back from the organization that we are inviting to speak to the chapter.

November Event

Scheduled for Saturday, November 7th, this event includes several sessions on creating an online presence, something that is increasingly useful (and even expected) in our field. Details will be coming soon.

Tentative Program

Out of our brainstorming in August, we have created a tentative program going through 2010. It is a work in progress at this point (see the next item). We hope to allow well known but distant leaders in tech comm reach us through webinars. This type of event would also allow more members to participate in events. Webinars are often costly for attendees, and we want to mitigate the expense to members as much as possible to allow more participation.

Polling Members

We will soon be sending out a questionnaire to the chapter to find out what you want out of STC and the Intermountain Chapter. The officers have our ideas, and we have a tentative plan for events, but we want to know what your ideas are. This will be your chance to make your voice heard and affect our events. What types of events do you prefer? What topics are of most interest to you? What are some good venues? We would like your answers to questions like these.

Our chapter events will also include brief evaluations. This isn’t to add drudgery to the events or make them look more fitting for a professional association; rather, we plan to actively use the information you give us through these evaluations to continually make our events more beneficial to you.