Chapter
Offers Low-Cost Training Opportunities
By
Michelle Petersen, VP Professional
Development
Recognize yourself?
- You've
been looking for work for several (or many) months, and you're going
to scream if you have The Conversation again with yet another recruiter
or HR representative:
"Do you have any Dreamweaver/WebPublisher/FrameMaker (+SGML, of course)? No? But you have Frame 6 and HomeSite experience? Oh, okay. Let me get back to you." - After working on the same three books for the past three years, you're bored stiff with your current job at a relatively stable company, but you're waiting until the economy gets better before seriously looking for something else. Your eyes occasionally (or frequently) wander to Monster or Dice, but the ads all seem to be asking for someone with Photoshop or Dreamweaver experience--applications that you've maybe played around with a bit, but don't feel comfortable listing on your résumé.
- At your latest contract, you've inherited 600 pages of documentation where all of the screen captures have been resized and squished to fit into the company's FrameMaker templates. The graphics are a blurry mess. As you update the screen captures for a new release, you know that there has to be a better way to work with the limited page space that you have, but you're just not quite sure what to do.
As technical writers, we frequently want or need to update our technical skills to either do our current jobs better or find a better job. Unfortunately, many of us are currently out of work. For those who are employed, many companies have slashed training budgets and provide limited educational assistance. Over the course of the next STC chapter year, this column will focus on identifying low-cost training opportunities, such as homegrown seminars, telephone seminars, and other classes for San Diego Chapter members.
Telephone Seminars
The San Diego Chapter is subsidizing group sessions of STC's series of telephone seminars for seminar topics that generate sufficient interest. The fee for attending one of these group sessions is only $10 per participant.
See the "Professional Development" section of the chapter Web site for more details about telephone seminars.
Fall Classes at UCSD Extension
The fall class schedule for UCSD Extension's Technical Communication Program is now available online at http://www.extension.ucsd.edu/Programs/index.cfm?vAction=certDetail&CertificateID=113.
You do not have to be enrolled in the certificate program to enroll in one of the following courses currently scheduled for fall 2003:
- Technical Communication I
- Tools for Technical Communicators
- Presentation Skills for Technical Communicators
- Copyediting I
- Writing for the Biotech Industry
- Computer Networks I
- Introduction to Computer Science
- Digital Imaging I: Photoshop 1a
- Adobe Illustrator: Introduction
- Dreamweaver I
- XML for the Web: Part I
