THE JOB FRONT: INFORMATIONAL INTERVIEWS (December 19)

More progress on the career front.

This morning I arranged to call an old Aramco schoolmate who is a senior executive editor (Language Arts) for Holt, Rinehart, and Winston (HRW) publishing house in Austin, Texas. It wasn't a job interview; I reassured her ahead of time that I was after information about the publishing industry and her perspective on its future - where hiring was occurring, etc.

We chatted for an hour (I kept stopping every 15 minutes to make sure she was OK with continuing). Some highlights of our talk:

The future of the textbook / educational publishing industry:

The Big 4 (HRW, Pearson, Glencoe, and MacDougal), among others, are inexorably becoming "dinosaurs" that will either become more flexible to meet the fast changing needs of US education or become "obsolete". Currently, they are too big, too byzantine in their corporate bureaucracy, and too slow at getting information and communicating it within the company. The future, she feels, is with smaller, more flexible publishing houses, especially those that specialize in multimedia. Increasingly, the model for success will be for the old, mainline companies to develop "smart partnerships" with smaller "development houses", where the real innovation is occurring. The larger corporation will then become a "shell" to select and manage projects in which smaller houses do the actual work.

The place of Foreign Languages (her company calls them "World Languages") within publishing:

The school textbook market depends on volume of orders. Math and language arts, for example, are required year after year in school programs, whereas World Languages may only be required for a year - or not at all. Consequently, language arts takes up 50% of HRW's budget, whereas World Languages may be only 15%. However, she said that HRW's World Languages division is more progressive and innovative than most other departments. She's envious!

My best bets for jobs in the *creative* side of the business (actually doing the materials):

*"Development houses," such as Word and Numbers in Baltimore, smaller companies (from 2-member "mom-and-pop" businesses to houses employing a couple hundred employees) that do project work for many mainline publishers, making video and audio content, writing textbook chapters, and image acquisitions (getting legal permissions to use images), etc.

*While the big companies are "right sizing" (laying people off and rehiring to get the right balance - 40% laid off in the last 3 years at HRW), smaller media groups are hiring by the score.

* Conceptual liaison positions: acting as the middle man between editorial groups in the corporation (who want, for instance, a new biology text for Middle School) and the end producers (e.g. software programmers in India) - someone to translate the wishes of the company into methods and prototype exercises/lessons that the end publishers/programmers can use to make a finished product to sell.

Who actually writes foreign-language textbooks?

While a university professor's name may be on the outside of a textbook, in reality, s/he normally contributes only large-scale elements: the chapter topics, main methodology, review of final manuscript. The real word-by-word and exercise-by-exercise writing is done by "grunts" either in-house or, more and more commonly, outside consultants.

Advice for job hunting:

* Bring work samples (a portfolio of your ideas, past materials) in addition to a résumé

* Attend conferences on technology in education (e.g. NCEA)

* Know the publishing market and industry - which products are most successful (both financially and educationally - e.g. view "efficacy studies" on how well a text worked in the classroom), which companies are important in the business, how companies are doing financially, how textbooks are ordered (whether by state "adoption" - a big state selects texts for the entire public system - or "open territory" - each school district selects).

* Be open to various kinds of employment: full-time with a company, project employment (hired by a company for the life of a big project), or free-lance.

Companies to look into:


* Words and Numbers - Baltimore (a "development house" she admires)
* Prentice Hall/Pearson - far northern New Jersey
* Eureka Software - Austin (mainly in tech, but moving more into making its own educational content)

Ironically, at a time when I'm looking to get *into* the industry, my friend is looking to get out! She's thinking of going back to school either in nursing or social work to help Palestinian human and economic development. She also has a side consulting business, Moggie Editorial Group ("moggie" is British slang for a tom cat), in which she serves as a kind of "ghost writer" for textbook projects. (Often the assumed textbook authors with the knowledge of the field are HORRIBLE writers!)

Christmas is coming soon, but my current lease ends January 31! Time to get serious about the job business! ...