If you’ve ever needed a toilet fixed, a fence built, your car serviced, or any type of home repair or construction done, you’ve used a tradesperson to do it. But there’s a big problem looming: a tremendous shortage of people working in the skilled trades, namely:

• electricians
• plumbers
• carpenters
• drywallers
• metalworkers
• masons
• machinists
• glaziers (window & glass installers)
• tilers
• auto-mechanics
• anything to do with home construction

(It’s interesting that these professions are called the skilled trades – is there any profession that isn’t skilled?) In any case, there is a shortage in these fields for two simple reasons:

1. Older people currently in these professions are retiring or dying.
2. Fewer young people are choosing to go into these professions.

The reasons that fewer people are going into the trades vary, but it’s generally due to the misconception that these jobs are not as prestigious as the so-called “professional” fields such as the arts, science, medicine, engineering, teaching, business and law.

This labour shortage alone is cause for concern. But when combined with the fact that many graduates are facing a mountain of student debt, the situation becomes near-catastrophic.

Forbes reported in 2017 that the current U.S. student debt is a staggering $1.3 trillion, or just over $36,000 per student. Adding insult to injury, many of these graduates are unable to find work in their chosen field, and therefore unable to pay this debt, which can never be written off, even if the student declares bankruptcy.

The solution to this “trilogy of terror” (lack of skilled tradespeople, high student debt and low graduate employment rates) is obvious: steer students away from programs with a low chance for career success and toward careers such as the skilled trades that have a higher success rate. The “$1.3 trillion” question is,  of course, how?

What’s desperately needed is a standard rating system of career success for all university and college programs. This must be a single number that is easy to understand and which allows a clear and fair comparison.

This number would be comprised of just three factors. The first is the percentage of students who obtain a position in their chosen field within one year after graduating. This is the Placement rate, or P.

The second number reflects the average current salary of a graduate in their chosen profession. In this case, we would add an additional year after the first year (for a total of two years) to allow sufficient time for the graduate to find and retain a job in their field. This is the Salary factor, or S.

However, salary by itself is not a meaningful number; it needs to be pro-rated to a basic amount. This amount would be the average salary of all workers within a state or province. So the formula for S is:

S = the average salary (after 2 years) of graduates successfully placed in their field divided by the average salary of the state or province

This will generate a percentage which will form part of the final number.

These two numbers alone would be very useful in revealing the relative success rate of each educational program. But a third and final number is also required. It applies to all students before they have even begun their studies: the percentage of students who successfully complete the program.

This number is important because even if a program has a high placement rate and high salary, if only a small fraction of the students can complete the program, its overall success rate is less.

This third and final number is the Completion rate or C. We’ll put this number at the beginning of the formula to keep the numbers in a somewhat chronological order.

Summing up, we have:

• Completion rate (C): the percentage of students who complete the program
• Placement rate (P): the percentage of students who find a position in their field within one year after graduation
• Salary factor (S): the average salary of students who find a position in their field (within two years after graduation) relative to the average state or provincial salary

Multiply these three numbers together, we obtain an overall percentage success rate. This is the Program Success Index or PSI.

We now have the final formula:
PSI = C x P x S

To illustrate the power of this number, let’s look at two extreme examples. (Note these are sample numbers only and assume an average state or provincial salary of $50,000.)

The first is a Bachelor of Arts (BA) program, which typically has both a low placement rate and low starting salary:

• Completion rate = 95%
• Placement rate = 10%
• Salary rate = ($30,000/$50,000) = 60%
• Program Success Index = .95 x .10 x .60 = 6%

By contrast, a skilled trade such as plumbing has a higher placement rate and starting salary, but may have a lower completion rate:

• Completion rate = 85%
• Placement rate = 97%
• Salary rate = ($70,000/$50,000) = 140%
• Program Success Index= .85 x .97 x 1.40 = 115%

Summing up, we have:

• Bachelor of Arts PSI = 6%
• Plumbing PSI = 115%

That is, the PSI for plumbing is twenty times greater than that of a B.A.

Imagine the impact that these numbers could have a student’s choice of career. Yes, the arts and humanities are important. Yes, we should all know our history and learn how to think critically. But that is not the point.

We are facing a crisis of employment and economics that is threatening to shake our society to the core, potentially impoverishing millions with debt and an education that has little or no value. These facts are more important than whether someone has a good grasp of English literature. Without a strong economy, gainful employment and a basic level of income, few will have the money to buy literature or the means to appreciate it.

The sad fact is that as useful and life-changing as a quotient like this would be, most universities would never implement it, because it would cause enrollment to drop and hurt their profits. Technical colleges might use it because it would be an obvious selling point for their programs.

However, soon universities may not have a choice. The $1.3 trillion student debt bubble, just like the U.S. housing bubble, will eventually collapse from its own weight. There will simply not be enough people who can afford the hundreds of thousands of dollars for a university degree program that offers no reasonable return on investment.

You don’t need a degree in economics to figure that out.

Embedded journalism is the practice of taking news reporters and placing or “embedding” them within military units so that they can report up-close on a war. In the process, they shift from being independent journalists to dependent, because the very people that the journalists are reporting on have to save them from death, dismemberment, and other career-limiting moves.

All workers are embedded. Doctors are embedded in hospitals, policeman in high-crime areas, teachers in schools, and musicians in concert halls. In our jobs and throughout our lives, we are surrounded by others, embedded among our co-workers, friends and family.

To be an outstanding technical and business communicator, you need to be embedded within a business that completely relies on your skills. Ideally, you should be embedded within a smaller company (one with less than 100 employees) where you are the only person who has these skills; where you are the entire business document development and management department, one that you have developed and nurtured. You will never have a better job than one you created.

Ideally, you will be in charge of:

• the company’s online content including their website, LinkedIn and Indeed pages, and job postings (and if any of these don’t exist, you must create them)
• developing and managing their internal business content including: company emails, newsletters, forms, staff lists, training requirements, job guides, signs, policies and procedures, and job descriptions
• any other documentation or information that the company needs to properly function including: press releases, brochures, signs, online surveys, schedules, questionnaires, feedback forms, etc.

Now, did you see what I did in that last sentence? I ended it with etc., the lazy writer’s way of saying: “I can’t be bothered to properly complete this list so I will just use etc. and let the reader fill in the blanks.” If there is one term that should be banned in all writing, it is etc.

But we can admire etc. for its deeper meaning, which is that it represents the completion of the list or thought that it describes differently for each reader. That is, each person will read the same sentence ending with etc. and fill in with their minds what the etc. represents. Etc. is the ultimate split-personality multi-tasker.

A great embedded technical communicator is an etc. They anticipate your thoughts and needs, and fulfill them. They are flexible and adaptable and know what you want before you knew that you wanted it. They complete you, and document the whole process.

It’s no coincidence that the acronym of Embedded Technical Communicator is ETC.

(Those are my thoughts, etc., etc…)

What do a doctor, lawyer, and priest have in common? A very special arrangement with their users which ensures total confidentially. It goes by different names, depending on the profession.

For doctors, it’s doctor-patient confidentiality; for lawyers, attorney-client privilege; for priests, priest-penitent privilege or clergy privilege.

Whatever its name, the principle is the same: that all communication between the professional and the client is strictly confidential. It’s an important principle because it helps ensure full, open, and honest communication.

A similar principle applies to our profession: communicator-reviewer privilege. When we review a document with someone, there’s an implicit understanding that everything the reviewer says is private. However, we also need to make reviewers aware that if they make a comment on a draft, it could be shared with others. Also, if they raise issues that require us to do further research with others, we need to make the reviewer aware of this.

If reviewers can’t trust that what we discuss with them will remain private, they won’t make very good reviewers. An informational wall will be built up, and it’s a very hard wall to tear down.

An even more important principle of confidentially we follow is communicator-client privilege, where the client is the customer or company you work for. It’s an important and legally-binding rule that we don’t divulge inside information to public end users. Clients must know and trust that we will keep internal information private, otherwise they won’t us with their documentation.

Now, this can lead to awkward situations and moral dilemmas. What if you discover that one of the features you’re documenting does not function as it described? It would not be advisable to start tweeting this fact or posting the problem on Facebook. Your obligation is make the owners of the product (the product manager, the development manager, or both) aware of the problem in writing, via email. If a higher-level manager ever inquires about it, you can show them the email you sent. Now it is no longer your problem – it is their problem.

Confidentiality, therefore, is one of the cornerstones of our profession (along with other c-words such as clarity and conciseness.) Without it, the technical communication process simply won’t work. Confidentiality can only occur if there is trust from the person or entity giving the information to the one receiving it. The person giving us this information is “lending” it to us, with the understanding that we won’t share it unless given permission to. The information lender must be confident that we will keep what they say private.

And that is why the first word in confidentiality is confident.