What Is Extra and What Is Essential?
Bryce is president of STC Pittsburgh. He wrote this timely item as the chapter’s monthly president’s column and offered to share it with us, because many members are thinking about not renewing or joining, given the current economic situation.
Recently, I’ve heard other STC members talking about the economy, especially the rising cost of fuel, food, health care, and other necessities, and the falling value of their homes and investments. For some STC members, their membership in STC is a prime candidate for an “extra” item to cut from their personal or professional budgets. You may be thinking about not renewing your membership in STC when it expires, or if you aren’t a current member, you may be having second thoughts about joining STC. If you still plan to renew or join STC, you may also be thinking about cutting back on meetings or events.
Before you decide not to renew or join STC, or skip a meeting you’d like to attend, I’d like to ask you this question: Over your lifetime, what is your most valuable and biggest asset?
- Your home
- Your education
- Your career
- Your retirement plan
Answer: Your career is your biggest and most important asset. Your career gives you the income to get the necessities of life, such as food, clothing, and shelter, and also to get an education, real estate, a retirement plan, and other investments and assets. When you think about how much of your time every day you spend working and how much of your lifetime is spent working, you can see why your career is so important. That’s why it’s important to manage your career well.
STC helps you manage your career by helping you to:
- Launch your technical communication career or transition into a technical communication career
- Learn new skills and enhance existing ones
- Find opportunities to network with fellow technical communication professionals
- Find a new job or a better job
- Launch an independent technical communication career
- Find help when you need it
- Improve your “soft” skills, such as public speaking or team-building skills
The cost of STC membership is “chump change” compared to the value it adds to your career. For example, STC’s free or low-cost articles, seminars, and conferences give you knowledge and skills to not only keep up with changes in the fast-paced technical communication field, but also get ready for the technical communication jobs of the future.
On a personal note, I’ve now been through four “career transitions” in my eight years as a technical communicator. In some cases, they occurred because of circumstances beyond my control, such as economic conditions; in others, there were things that I could have done or not done that might have led to a different outcome. In every case, I found STC to be a helpful resource to manage these transitions. STC proved valuable as a go-to for technical communication job leads, ways to improve my technical and interpersonal skills, and just to know that I wasn’t alone in my career transition. STC Pittsburgh’s WorkQuest was, as the MasterCard slogan goes, priceless. Also, in every case, employers and potential employers noticed my membership in STC on my resume, and some even knew of me from STC.
As President of STC Pittsburgh, part of my job is promoting the chapter and the Society, and I wrote this column as a way to promote STC and to make a case that STC is more important to your career in times like these. But I also wrote it to explain how STC helped me and why I joined STC.
With that in mind, if you join or renew your membership in November, you’ll receive two months free, because your membership won’t expire until the end of 2009. Visit stc.org to join or renew. Also, ask me about membership, because not only am I STC Pittsburgh’s President, I’m also a member!