Minneapolis and Mary Tyler Moore

by Paul Holland, Senior Member

I attended the 54th Annual Conference this year in Minneapolis. As always, the conference was a valuable opportunity to spend time with other technical communicators.

First of all, Minneapolis rocks. It was a delightful city to visit and the local STC community did a fabulous job of welcoming the STC. And Mary Tyler Moore, what more needs to be said? I visited that statue twice.

The conference is always an interesting event. In justifying the cost to my employer or in deciding to spend my own cash, it is often difficult to define a specific, tangible benefit from the conference. Quite frankly, much of the information that is shared is available on the Web and the training sessions. Even at 90 minutes, the sessions are not long enough to acquire a new skill set. Technical communicators will still end up doing a self-study program to really internalize the new skill.

What the sessions are long enough to accomplish is determining what skill sets will provide the best return on investment if I invest the effort in acquiring them over the coming year. We are all far too busy to invest the hours required to master a skill set, a new software tool for example, and then find that our efforts would have been better expended developing a different skill.

Another benefit I have found at the conference is the opportunity to explore and evaluate best practices. Everyone has an opinion on the best way to complete a given task and sometimes these are all correct because various personalities are effective using one or another methodology. Other times, however, there is a specific, time tested, best practice and discussing the challenges others have experienced and the solutions they have found most effective is very valuable.

The conference is also a wonderful opportunity to meet technical communicators from other industries and to see their exciting work.

“Our Community.” That has a wonderful ring to it. So often we are defined, rightly or not, by what we do. My brother is a lawyer or I am a doctor or she is a scientist, and so on. But there is value in being a technical communicator and as our jobs expand to include other skills, and as we more inclusively define what our job entails, identifying the community has value. Doctors have the AMA, lawyers the ABA, and we have the STC.

I cringe when I hear someone say, “Oh, I was a technical writer but I moved on,” as though this is a stepping stone and not a destination. The annual conference helps maintain the enthusiasm each of us should have for our profession. Being a technical communicator, complete with inner geek and grammarian is very cool.

Lastly, networking for new opportunities or for new resources is easily accomplished at conference. There is not a better location to connect with opportunities within the communications profession.

It is hard to “spreadsheet out” the benefits of conference but once you have attended one you will understand how it can keep the horizon visible and prevent us from focusing too much on what we can see here alone in our positions, hunkered down in a cubicle, staring at the Shell station across the street that keeps raising its gas prices ($2.71 the day this was written).