Editor’s note: Cindy is currently our Region 1 Director, and will be speaking at spectrum on March 23.

Taking Technical Communication to New Heights!

Hello STC members! I’m Cindy Currie, a candidate for Second Vice President (2VP). I’m currently a Director, Community Affairs Committee chair, and a Strategic Planning Committee member. I belong to the Northern New England and UK chapters and five SIGs. I’ve been a member since 1991 and a Fellow since 2005.

For the past two years, I’ve worked hard to help STC deliver more value for all members. I want to continue this work, and I feel that I can best do that by increasing my commitment to STC through the office of 2VP.

My primary focus is promoting the value of technical communication to business. We need to ensure that senior management fully understands the role we play in helping to increase the bottom line of business. It is through relationships at this level that we will succeed in bringing the profession closer to the core of business, raising its profile, and creating new and higher-level roles for technical communicators. I know we can do this by concentrating on four key areas:

• Codifying our body of knowledge – The certification debate continues, with strong feelings on both sides. Certification – if we choose to go in that direction – isn’t possible without a body of knowledge (BoK) against which to certify TCs. In either case, a BoK is essential to elevating the profession in the global business hierarchy, helping to further legitimize it.
• Enhancing and expanding professional growth opportunities – Members must be ready to meet new and exciting challenges, so we must provide a variety of business and leadership learning opportunities, as well as education and training on methods and tools.
• Creating a solid identity for STC – We need strong brand identity that loudly trumpets STC’s industry leadership of the profession, and is quickly and easily recognized as one that means quality – of both the practice and its practitioners.
• Reworking our business model and infrastructure – We must be able to identify, support, and promote changes and improvements with clarity, speed, and agility. STC is a business and we need to run it like a business with all the right frameworks in place to deliver on all of our commitments – to members, partners, academe, and business.

So, let’s take technical communication to new heights!

To learn more about all of this year’s candidates and to ask questions, please go to http://www.stc.org/candidatesFAQ/index.asp