Technical editing is a field in the midst of rapid change. Competencies for many editorial positions now extend beyond text and markup; today, many newly-hired editors can expect to apply best practices in editing to digitally-born products as well as print genres.This presentation provides both practitioners and academics, insight about the challenges and opportunities for training and hiring editors. For practitioners, our session situates how students perceive technical editing as both an academic subject and a workplace task, and its perceived value when reconfigured to include multimodal practices. We also highlight how business and industry can re-envision their connections with the academy to shape editing courses that meet real-world needs. Additionally, we explore how new editing competencies can be incorporated into existing work practices and products, and what these convergences mean for future workplace hires. For academics, our session demonstrates what assumptions students had concerning the class, as well as where they perceived their greatest weaknesses for handling the coursework to be. We’ll present ideas for more effectively structuring curriculum for technical editing to meet market demands and remedy student weaknesses in order to prepare students to take on leading edge roles in editing.
