Today’s Plan:
- HELLO!
- Introducing Project One
- Qualitative Coding
HELLO!
A very quick gloss of the course:
- Project One: Analyzing Job Ads
- Project Two: Developing a Proficiency
- Project Three: Working with a Non-Profit Organization
- Project Four: Applying for Jobs
Office hours: 1180D Tuesday 12:00-3:00. Also by appointment (email to set up a time).
Project One: Analyzing Job Ads / Sharing mediabistro.com Job Corpus
Your first project this semester dovetails with a current research project I have been working on. As we revise UNC’s writing minor, I have been curious as to what skills and technologies to focus on. This curiosity led me to research job advertisements for English majors, and Brumberger and Lauer stands as the most recent and comprehensive study I found. However, their article focuses on “technical communication.” This designation can have many meanings–sometimes it is merely a synonym for professional writing. But not in their case–they use (as do I) in the more precise sense of developing documentation (instruction manuals), product testing (usability reports), and working with scientific experts to communicate scientific/technical knowledge. Our department doesn’t have someone with those specializations (though we have developed ENG 227 to introduce you to these genres/skills). While I appreciate B&R’s research, I wanted something a bit more relevant to a smaller department. Their research speaks more to folks at large research institutions with Professional and Technical Writing majors, more specialized faculty, and software licenses such as MadCap Flare or Adobe RoboHelp. We are a much smaller department with 5 tenure-track faculty (and none of us, I think, would claim Professional or Technical writing as a core specialization). My background, for instance, is in rhetorical theory, ethics, and digital technology (how the internet, social media, video games, wikis, etc [digital technologies] change the way we see and interact [ethics] and how we perceive, distribute, question, and respond to knowledge/argumentation/feeling [rhetoric]).
So I’ve turned my attention to Professional Writing jobs outside of technical writing. During my research, I came across a specialized job listing site–mediabistro.com. From their “About Us” page:
Mediabistro is the premier media job listings site and career destination for savvy media professionals. Whether you’re searching for new job opportunities, striving to advance your career, or looking to learn new skills and develop valuable expertise, we are here to strengthen and support your professional journey. We have the tools and resources to help you navigate your own path and find career happiness.
In addition to job postings, mediabistro.com offers resume services and courses on professionalization and personal brand building. Rather than turning to a more popular site like monster.com, I used mediabistro.com because it focuses specifically on jobs involving writing and communication. It also brands itself as a place for creative folks (mostly writers) to find jobs. And, after a cursory preview, most of the jobs advertised on the site are not technical writing jobs as I described them above.
I spent the month of June 2018 scanning every job ad posted to mediabistro.com. I filtered out jobs that:
- Called for experience in television production (especially those that required years of on-air experience)
- Called for extensive experience as a field journalist (although I retained jobs open to those without journalistic experience; a few jobs were looking for bloggers or content contributers)
- Required degrees in finance or accounting
- Required extensive experience with Google Ads and/or other Customer Relationship Management (CRM) softwares (Salesforce was particularly popular)
- Required applicants bring a client log with them
- Required management or hiring experience (the term management is quite slippery in adverts; sometimes it means “manage a team” and clearly indicates the need for leadership experience. Sometimes it means “manage our twitter account” and isn’t, per se, a leadership position)
- Required backend coding skills
- Required extensive graphic design portfolios (I did retain entry level graphic design jobs)
- Required 5 or more years of experience
- Telemarketing jobs, part-time jobs, or unpaid internships
After filtering out these jobs, I was left with a corpus of about 300 jobs.
Over the next week, you will code 20 jobs from this site. But before I ask you to select and code those jobs, we will first work on what is called “norming.” Coding qualitative research means looking at a text to identify pre-determined features. In our case, we will be using a slightly modified version of Brumberger and Lauer’s coding scheme. We will be sharing our research findings using a Google Spreadsheet. In order to make this research as reliable and valid as possible, we want to make sure that everyone understands the coding scheme and is “seeing” the same codes in our texts (our job ads). This might sound confusing now–but I am confident you’ll pick this up quickly. Later today we will begin norming by practicing coding adds and sharing results.
First, let’s take a look at the coding scheme.
Okay, now let’s use the coding scheme to code a sample job ad.
Homework
This weekend your homework is to code the remaining jobs in the introductory packet. We will compare codes in Monday’s class.
We will discuss the Herrick, “Overview of Rhetoric” chapter (.pdf in Files section of Canvas) on Friday. There is a discussion forum post with instructions in Canvas. Complete that discussion forum by midnight on Thursday.
