RE: TW Trade Schools..Do U?

Subject: RE: TW Trade Schools..Do U?
From: Bruce Byfield <bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com>
To: techwr-l digest recipients <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Fri, 12 May 2000 10:54:24 -0700

Johnny Brown [mailto:johnny_brown -at- hotbot -dot- com] writes:
> Does anyone out there hire candidates that have attended TW
> Trade Schools? That is, those that train wide-eyed students
> and in about 4-6 weeks, then sends them merily on their way
> with a shiny new certificate in their hands after paying a
> vulgar amount of money, and convinces them that they are now
> a full-fledged writer?

In general, formal qualifications mean very little. I've known
doctoral students who didn't have two brain cells to rub
together, and high school dropouts who are so stone brillliant
that they gave me an inferiority complex.

As an ex-university instructor, I've come to believe that formal
schooling provides an opportunity to learn, but can rarely teach
anyone who isn't ready to learn. Yet many of the time-servers can
still get the formal qualifications, because standards are set
low enough that most people who do the work can pass. After all,
when a learning institution goes looking for funding, a 45%
failure rate looks like the institution's failure.

Another important consideration is that any curriculum is out of
date by the time that it's developed. As a general rule, grad
students study the latest developments in their fields,
undergraduates what was happening five to ten years ago, and high
school students what was current twenty years ago. The
trickle-down of knowledge takes time.

Tech-writing certificate programs are no exception to these
general statements. If anything, they tend to be worse. For one
thing, they have a hard time finding the right teachers: too
often, the instructors are either academics without much
tech-writing experience or else they are managers with little
experience in the classroom or a lack of recent hands-on writing
experience. At times, they seem blatant cash-grabs.

Also, in a field that is changing as quickly as tech-writing,
five years is a long time (I'm assuming here that the programs
are the equivalent to undergrad courses in academia). It may
impossible, no matter how well-meaning everyone is, for the
programs to be current. By the time the text books are written
and the lessons plans are developed, the information given to the
students is already obsolete.

Over the last few years, I've interviewed five or six people with
certificates. Taking them as a whole, I didn't find them any more
or less qualified than other candidates. However, I did find that
they tended to have an inflated opinion of their abilities.

Bottom line: I would not base a hiring decision on whether a
candidate did or didn't have a certificate.

--
Bruce Byfield, Outlaw Communications
"The Open Road" column, Maximum Linux
3015 Aries Place, Burnaby, BC V3J 7E8, Canada
bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com 604.421.7189

"I'll never get to heaven, no matter what I do,
I'll never be a blue-eyed boy, although my eyes are blue,
And I will not work, and I will not work, and I wll not work for
you."
-Ian Telfer, "The Generals Are Born Again"




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