Notes from 54th International STC Conference
Minneapolis, Minnesota, May 13-16, 2007

Tools vs. Humanity

Phylise Banner Klein, Skidmore College
Angela Eaton, Texas Tech
Alan Houser, Consultant
Karen Lane, Consultant
Jerry Franklin, Freelancer in high-tech marketing
Geoffrey Hart, desktop publishing
George Slaughter, University of Houston

Session Description: This session was in the format of a "town meeting" where panelists and audience discussed how technical/tool skills and communication skills interact. Questions considered included the following: What do industry managers look for when hiring? What kind of training best prepares us for getting the jobs we seek? What is the best path for training and skills development? The open discussion provided an opportunity to share your ideas and learn from your peers in the context of a moderated, focused exchange.

• Houser: Tools open up the doors for creativity and expression. They are also the key to many job opportunities.
• Hart: I can teach you any tool in a day. Core skills are much more important.
• Audience: If you’re hiring a landscaper, you care more about design ability than shoveling ability.
• Audience: Yes, but if you don’t know how to shovel, you can’t execute your design without hiring somebody who can.
• Audience: One recruiter said she hired for core skills, not specific tool skills. Tools can be taught a lot more easily than human skills.
• Slaughter, Audience: A number of people attested to having been hired for passion, integrity, and human skills even after acknowledging a need to be trained in the specified tool skill.
• Hart: Tools are necessary but not sufficient.
• Banner Klein: Context is extremely important in assessing the relative importance of tool vs humanity skills. Full-time staff position is totally unlike a 3-month contract position.
• Audience: It’s not just tools vs humanity, but also domain knowledge
• Audience: Chapters can offer low-cost workshops in tool skills using practitioners within the membership
• Audience: Core skills (writing, graphic design) are very difficult to teach. Tool skills can more easily be taught, but this is not a cost-effective approach to meeting a short-term requirement. "Soft" skills are a different area, encompassing interpersonal relations, team skills, ethics, and more.
• Professional Recruiter: In hiring decisions, superior tool skills can be a tiebreaker between candidates who are equally qualified in core skills and humanity skills
• Lane: As an indexer, she finds tool skills relatively secondary, yet she did get one job specifically because she had mastered a specific tool skill on the previous job (content areas were totally different)
• Audience: Tools get you the interview, humanity gets you the job
• Audience: "Humanity, not tools, drew me to the profession."
• Banner Klein: There’s a big difference between a technician and an information provider.
• Ecker: Networking can be an effective way to avoid being screened out of a job opportunity for the lack of a specific tool skill.
• Hart: Generalists will never outperform specialists within their specialty.
• What tool skills are most important in hiring? Microsoft Office suite and Adobe Acrobat dominate the field. For large-document situations, Framemaker can be important. In-Design is gaining popularity for graphic design. Web 2.0 suite (wikis, blogs, podcasts, RSS feeds, etc.) will become increasingly important. XML is important to understanding how to organize and deliver information. Phone, e-mail are very important to basic business communication. Version control is also important. Graphic tools can be important, especially in smaller organizations that lack in-house graphic specialists.
• Be careful in using personal web sites, MySpace, etc. "Fringe" content can disqualify you. Employers do search these sources.