"Socialization of the New Hire in the Workplace"

Linda Lambert

Linda Lambert graduated with a BS in Technical Communication (with High Honors) from New Mexico Tech in 2008. Her advisor for this thesis was Dr. Julie Ford. Linda currently works as a technical writer for research and development laboratory.

Contents

Abstract and Introduction

Purpose and Approach

What is "Socialization"?

Review of Literature 

Necessity vs. Sufficiency

The Path to Success

Conclusion

References

Review of Literature

This work organizes the literature review according to four general topics, which coincide approximately with major phases in the process of socialization outlined above. Some of these topics relate directly to the principal research questions posed by this thesis.

• What skills do TC programs teach? How does academia attempt to prepare the student for the workplace?
• What skills do employers want? How does industry perceive formal academic preparation as meeting industrial needs?
• How do employers orient their new hires? How do employers supplement their new hire’s formal training to better meet mutual needs?
• What can the individual do before and after getting hired? What additional opportunities might the student identify during formal preparation, such as course work not specifically required for a formal degree?

These topics relate to some of the aspects of the problem described above, and overlap the socialization steps outlined above.  The pivotal step of actually getting a job is beyond the scope of this work.

Comparison of these topics with the principal research questions reveals a gap. The literature asserts the importance of adding value beyond one’s job requirements but offers little specific guidance for accomplishing this—the next-to-last research question. Neither does the literature address the final research question—how to evolve a job into a career.

This section seeks to identify common themes in key pieces of research, infer and synthesize any consensus among them, and identify potential conflicts.  A gap analysis and identification of pathways to resolving remaining conflicts form the basis for possible further research and/or discussion.

What skills do TC programs teach?

Several works address the adequacy of formal TC curricula required by academic departments. An early work by Kalmbach, Jobst, and Meese (1986) recognizes the need to balance formal training in rhetoric with the acquisition of skills that enable more versatility.  The authors recognize the value of technical specialization, and suggest the success derived from specialization might be either short-lived or self-limiting. 

Allen’s 2004 study argues for an assessment of how well technical communication curricula prepare graduates to contribute to their business-oriented employers. Specific skills not necessarily acquired in pursuing formal curricula include business operations, project management, problem solving skills, and scientific and technical knowledge.

Brady’s 2007 survey assessed various methods of problem solving based on individual experiences. The profound differences in social setting notwithstanding, the basic theory of problem solving was found to remain the same.

Rainey, Turner, and Dayton (2005) compare perspectives of educators in academia with those of TC managers in industry, identify the skills each considers most important to the success of the TC professional, and suggest some additional avenues of collaboration between the two groups that would result in feedback to designers of curricula, and hence improvement in curricular offerings more closely aligned with managerial expectations. As in other works, the authors conclude that less technical (people) skills rank as highly as writing skills.  This premise is an important concept to be examined in this work. 

St. Amant (2003) specifically targets the internship as an essential component in the preparation of students for the TC profession.  First examining the structure of the traditional internship and its component roles (intern, provider, and advisor/overseer), the author recommends that broader sharing of information among all three roles yields more efficient and dynamic feedback channels for continuous improvement of the internship experiences.  Academia and industry have consistently recognized and adopted the internship as an indispensable component of a student’s pre-professional training and experience, which should enable students to acquire some on-the-job non-technical skills, such as project planning and management.

Schreiber (1993) identifies a gap between the academic setting and the workplace, postulating that curricula do not adequately prepare the student to become an early-functioning productive new hire in a corporate setting. 

What skills do employers want?

The new graduate attains a level of confidence upon receiving the degree. This bubble may burst when the new graduate-turned-new-hire discovers the rules of academia do not always apply to the rules of business. Most of the student’s training involved producing written artifacts represented by class assignments, projects, and theses. The student may be less aware that these artifacts required less obvious skills such as collaboration, sharing vision, individual responsibility, leadership, and eliciting needed information.

Bekins and Williams (2006) eloquently argue that the technical communicator, especially in the for-profit sector, must become part-and-parcel of the product development and production process, not simply a generator of product-documenting prose after-the-fact.  The TC professional thus adds value by being a jack-of-all-trades in the eyes of the employer, and therefore needs to acquire such skills as project management, product management, and people management, thus expanding the scope of the TC profession to position TC professionals as true value-added creative contributors.

Whiteside (2003) “examines the skills that recent technical communication graduates and managers believe technical communication students need before entering business and industry as new technical communicators.”  The author makes the case that academia needs to prepare students to meet managers’ expectations when the students become professionals, and that curriculum planners might better partner with industries that hire their graduates.

How do employers orient their new hire?

Most employers make certain expectations clear to the new hire. Obvious among these are work schedule, workplace ethics and behavior, “where’s the bathroom,” etc. Some employers spend more resources than others on orientation.

Bist (1996) outlines in detail a program for indoctrinating new hires into the desired organizational context, presuming a firm foundation in the art of writing itself.  The emphasis is on a proactive stance on the part of the company, placing the burden on the company to make clear certain aspects of company operation that the company needs the new hire to learn, specifically (1) the corporate culture, (2) the internal process of document generation, review, and production, (3) internally adopted writing style and formatting, and (4) technical tools the company has adopted for production.  Bist recognizes that perhaps costly proactivity on the part of the employer to streamline the assimilation of the new hire is as necessary investment that avoids the pitfalls of uncontrolled absorption of this information by random interactions. 

Anson and Forsberg (1990) contrast lateral versus vertical transfer of one’s skills, strengths, talents, and interests. They consider lateral transfer the application of skills learned in college with little modification or adaptation to the situational context. Vertical transfer includes problem solving, boundary spanning (though not specifically mentioned), and leveraging one’s life experiences. These life experiences might include the variety of jobs one has held, working on various projects, and perhaps course assignments that mimic on a smaller scale the situational context likely to be encountered in the workplace.

What can the individual do?

Clearly the student yields some personal sovereignty to the program faculty who determine the rules for obtaining a degree. Equally clearly, the new hire yields some personal sovereignty to the employer who has expectations of certain knowledge and performance. The individual retains freedom of choice in several arenas. How these choices are made can determine success or failure.

Anson and Forsberg (1990) examined the “transitions that writers make when moving from academic to professional discourse communities,” and yet again demonstrated the idea that success in the technical communication field is less about the skills acquired in the students’ educational programs and more about developing strategies of intellectual adaptation.  The fact that this paper focuses on the frustrations and accommodations of interns relates to the thesis author’s internship experiences, and led to an interest in this transitional process and how it might be streamlined.

Every social context involves relationships. These relationships in industrial institutions are commonly hierarchical which implies the distribution of power. Moore (1999) recommends strategies for coping with and perhaps mitigating the effects of conflict. This case study illustrates the need for an incisive understanding of a social context to which students may or may not have been exposed prior to entering the workplace.

The work of Haselkorn et al. highlights highly diverse projects in which technical communicators have had to extend their focus beyond document production. Thus it shows how the expanding role of technical communicators enhances the value of program graduates provided they are prepared to extend themselves.

Harrison and Debs (1988) introduce the role of the technical communicator as a “boundary-spanner” uniquely positioned to transcend internal organizational barriers as facilitators of information flow.  The authors emphasize non-technical (interpersonal) skills as well as business savvy (knowledge of organization operation), and writing specific to the organizational context.

From a series of cyber-commentaries from holders of graduate degrees, Wilson and Ford (2003) compiled a collection of candid perspectives TC graduates have developed as these graduates compare their expectations upon entering their professional experiences with the realities of their respective workplaces. The authors summarized their findings in a series of suggestions to streamline the transition: (1) include some general business savvy in formal curricula, (2) “teach the students to market themselves,” (3) force students to extract information for themselves, albeit difficult, (4) establish a mentoring program, (5) clearly establish the tech communicator's role in project teams, from cradle-to-grave, and (6) foster professional growth. However, while pursuing the first three is the responsibility of those in academia, the others belong to the employer.  These insights require some follow-up to narrow the gap between what to do and how to do it.  The employer role might be an especially hard-sell.