The end of an era with the Australian Computer Society (ACS) (2001-2015)
At the end of January 2015 I will allow my membership of the Australian Computer Society (ACS) to lapse. It's true that for the last couple of years I was only paying discount membership rates because of my employment/health status, and during that time I rarely if ever attended branch events. But before that I was an active member of the society, and I'd worked hard to be accepted as a member. At my peak I was a Certified Computer Professional (MACS CPP), a professional accreditation similar to being a Certified Practising Accountant - not a bad effort for an Arts graduate.
[Note: The standard of writing in this post is embarrassingly poor, I know. I was better when I did it for a living, honest, but now I'm just too tired.]
Getting Started
In 2000 I was working for a small bleeding-edge technology company when I narrowly escaped a round of involuntary redundancies. My boss fought to keep me, but the senior management in the US weren't entirely sure what I did. On paper I had only my BA Hons (Psych); in practice I did a lot of things to help keep the software development team ticking over: I wrote specifications, user documentation, designed job and issue tracking systems, and a bunch of stuff like that. I had that job because I knew people who knew people who appreciated the value of someone like me.
It's a different prospect on the open job market, and that scare made me realise I would have huge trouble finding a suitable job if the current one were to disappear. I was a solid technical writer, a bit of a business analyst, a bit of a project manager, quite a lot of (but not quite entirely) a project officer, a good chunk of a QA manager, a useful tech support person for an obscure range of technologies, and I knew how to use a shredder. On paper I would be hard pressed to qualify for any single one of those jobs (except technical writing, and at the time I wanted more than that), and the weird jobs such as the one I held were constructed as required from the organisational and technical spaces in-between. Those *never* got advertised, they grew.
So, I decided to take the job scare as a warning and went looking for courses that I could afford, were at a useful level, and could be done at the same time as full-time work. To cut a long story short, I was pointed at the Australian Computer Society's (ACS)certification program which was exactly what I was looking for - an opportunity for experienced but unqualified people working in the industry to Get That Piece Of Paper. Even the assignments could be based on your current workplace issues, so you could impress the boss by occasionally producing (on your own time) scholarly works of direct commercial interest. The fees were steep, but much more reasonable if you were a member of the ACS, so I looked at joining.
Getting In
Joining the ACS at that time was easy if you had a degree in computer science. Even students of computer science were encouraged to be become associate members. You could still join if you had no degree and relevant experience, but that took a bit more effort. The further that experience drifted from programming, the more challenging the application process became. Let's say I was at the pointy end, and had to amass a pile of forms, references, recommendations and begging essays to become just an Associate Member of the ACS, but I did and it was Good.
Two and a half years later I'd finished my studies, a little older, and large amounts wiser, and with the equivalent of roughly a third of an MBA and near the top of many of my units. At some points I'm told I both puzzled and intrigued my instructors, which I thought was just awesome. I was then accepted as a full Member of the ACS. I had letters after my name!
I did some interesting things at work too, and felt much more confident that I'd be able to carve a niche somewhere new if necessary. As it turns out I never did get another job through standard interview channels, but the subsequent positions that found me wouldn't have happened without that study. The business studies were particularly valuable.
A few years later the ACS implemented it's Certified Professional program, whereby full members in good standing could become certified as Computer Professionals as long as they completed and recorded their quota of professional development hours each year. I gained a few more letters after my name but I also relished the feeling that I was officially a respected member of an ethical and professional organisation.
Getting Involved
The easiest way to collect those PD hours was to attend the monthly branch forum meetings to listen to generally very interesting topics in current ICT technology and practice. It could be challenging just to turn up to those meetings, never mind the networking chat-with-drinks-and-nibbles after the main presentation. As a decidedly non-corporate type of female in her 30's, I was not like the majority of silver-haired suit-wearing male academics and senior management types who came to these things. The other main group were the middle-aged (male, of course) engineering types with whom I was more familiar. Occasionally I'd spot another Lady or two, but generally much older than I. It took a little time but I became used to it it, determined not to be intimidated. More useful skills acquired.
I always sat near the front for a good view and a best chance of hearing, and was happy to ask questions here and there. Sometimes I'd buttonhole the branch president and suggest that perhaps the annual networking Golf Day was not the most encouraging of environments for the female membership to get involved. When the W-ACS (Women's ACS) group/branch/subcommittee/division/department/whatever was formed I was not shy in suggesting that perhaps the purple floral theme on the new W-ACS website was perhaps inappropriately fluffy in a professional context. (The website had been outsourced and the person in charge was embarrassed and horrified to discover this, so I felt OK about pointing it out.) With a brain inclined to see the human aspects of technical and organisational problems I was able to introduce different viewpoints here and there. Not many in the room had studied anthropology, for example, and yet I found it one of the most useful things in my technology troubleshooting toolkit.
So yes, I was Trouble, and proud of it. (I also said some remarkably stupid things out of nerves during unstructured chit-chat - that's a skill I never did master.)
Getting Up There
[Ed: All these presentations were available on line at one time but have been shifted or de-linked. At time of writing I've not republished them, but do intend to and will remove this notice when I update the links. If I can find them. Oops.]
I was never one for committees and such, but there was something I could do to earn my keep, and that was become the speaker for one of the monthly Branch Forums. The company I was then working for had developed and were rapidly improving an amazing data analysis tool which addressed many of the issues that were currently under discussion in the field, so I volunteered to speak. I doubt they were flush with speakers, so it was probably easy to get that first posting. I was immensely proud and terrified beyond belief to present: Combining Financial and Physicals People, Data and Tools in Business Planning (Australian Computer Society, Perth September 2007)
tl;dr Engineers and Accountants speak different languages, count different things, and play with different tools, but eventually their knowledge and data must be combined to produce a unified business outlook. This is how you do it.
It went down well :-) It must have, because I was asked back the following year to do another one, to be repeated in Perth and the new ACS Branch in Bunbury. What Can Your Technical Writer Do? (Australian Computer Society, Perth, Bunbury July 2008; System Administrators Guild of Australia, Perth August 2008)
tl;dr Technical writers are critical links in establishing clear communication between groups with wildly varying knowledge, assumptions, and expectations.
This was very exciting for me as it's the first time I'd been asked to travel to a speaking engagement. OK, it was Bunbury (a couple of hours drive away), but it was very symbolic for me nonetheless, and a great chance to have a long talk with the official who drove me there and back. The additional invitation to speak at the System Administrator's Guild was an added bonus, and a chance to speak to a very different (i.e. more practical) audience.
I'll note here that a room full of system administrators had just as much trouble setting up a digital projector as a room full of heads of computer science departments and IT managers.
A non-trivial part of "What Can Your Technical Writer Do?" focussed on risk management (communicating the wrong thing can have dire consequences after all), and on the basis of that I was asked to present at a local Security Risk conference. I have many friends who are academics who frequently jet all over the place to attend and speak at conferences, so all this may seem a little ho hum. But I was proud of myself from coming up through the ranks to get to a position to be heard. The wrong ranks at that - the number of psychology graduates at these things tended to approach zero, never mind being of the female persuasion.
Sadly by now my health had started to deteriorate significantly, and I struggled to prepare the conference presentation, eventually needing to withdraw. The organisers liked what I'd done so far, and with my permission published the solid but unpolished draft in the conference papers.
A call came out of the blue asking if I could fill in as an emergency speaker at a W-ACS event. I had a week or two to prepare, so used the Communication Risks presentation I'd been working on, with a slightly tweaked introduction since it really didn't have much to do with gender: Communication Risks (Australian Computer Society Women's Group, Perth August 2010)
From the introduction:
"Unfortunately I haven’t noticeably suffered from being a female in the IT workplace; I’ve felt no glass ceiling. I haven’t met anyone who’s done quite the same job that I do, so I can’t really compare pay scales. I’m childless and comfortably so. No sexual harassment. No obvious discrimination that I recall. I’ve worked in a statistically male-dominated workplace almost my entire career, but in the long run it hasn’t really been a problem for me. Sorry.
I’ve certainly SEEN huge amounts of sexism. And to a certain extent I’ve had to become one of the boys but I believe I’ve managed to avoid the trap of becoming a ball-crusher of some sort. Occasionally, I’ve also found it necessary to become one the girls. I’ve often had to become one of the developer group, or one of the consulting group, or one of the training group. You do what you have to do and so far I haven’t had to do anything too terrible.
I have noticed that I get more professional respect than I used to 20 years ago, but as far as I can tell I haven’t changed gender lately, so I put that down to experience and professional development. A good chunk of that professional development has been through the ACS and perhaps they have cured me of being a girl.
So without personal experience or any desire whatsoever to talk to you about feminist theory I’m either the best person to talk to a group of Women in IT, or the worst."
I got two job offers out of that night, but I had to present while sitting down and there was just no room in my life to pursue those opportunities. Over the years of my active ACS membership I received a lot of interest from recruiters-the networking was doing its job-but I never had any spare capacity to follow them up. But by golly it was nice to be asked, and I could have earned embarrassingly large piles of cash if health had permitted and I was more interested in chasing money than staying with projects and people that I knew were interesting and fun. For a while there I was spoiled for choice.
Falling Down
And now the sad part. My health did not permit. I managed to stay in the workforce for a couple of years longer than I might have because I was only able to work part time and my client could only afford me part time, so it worked for both of us. And then I was only able to work from home, for a shrinking number of hours per week (I did some of my best work between 4-6am). As a last hurrah I was given an extended remote handover/training gig for a few hours a week until that too came to an end. I don't have a date handy for that, but it must be something like two years now.
Quite apart from all the benefits listed above, my ACS membership had brought me a good deal on my mortgage, and the email address I'd been using for about 10 years. Those two attachments kept me paying my dues at the fortunately reduced unemployed rate for a while, even though I'd had to give up going to the monthly meetings-it was just too painful to sit in a chair for a couple of hours-and stopped keeping up with the society news. (I did send in the odd mildly angry letter about sexism.) I cleared the mortgage, and I've done my best to switch over my email address.
A week or two ago I took a deep breath and advised membership services that I would not be renewing my membership when it fell due on January 30 2015. It hurt. It hurt a lot. I thought I was long-since finished with grieving the loss of my career, but the ACS years represented the very best of it. I wanted to write this post to explain to people what it had meant to me and why it hurt so much to officially leave, to finally give it all up, but I was shocked at the effect it had on me. Last night I had a big cry but eventually felt better for it. It really is all gone now. I'm not that person any more, and never will be again. But damn I was good.
Bugger.
*sniff*