Over my career, I have moved in and out of industry and government agencies, performing a variety of consulting and training services. I have also worked extensively with public schools and universities on faculty and program development.
While an assistant professor at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, I worked with various public schools and the state of Illinois to develop writing curricula, to develop goals and outcomes assessment, and to integrate technology into instruction. I also worked closely with Ted Smith, a friend from graduate school at University of Michigan, on training programs in technical environments, within companies such as Motorola, Hughes Aircraft, and IBM.
During 14 years at New Mexico State University, I did a lot of workplace training, for the city of Las Cruces and the State of New Mexico. With Stuart Brown and others at NMSU, I consulted on ecomomic development projects through the Center for Economic Development. Our clients included many of the pueblos and reservations of northern New Mexico and Arizona. I worked with the State Department of Education in New Mexico (standards for preparation of vocational education teachers; training for forestry workers).
For five years, I developed National Workplace Literacy Demonstration Projects, working with partner hospitals throughout New Mexico. Paul Meyer was my co-director on these funded training and development initiatives.
More recently, I spent a year (1995-96) as Senior Consultant for Scientific Services, Franklin Quest Consulting Group (formerly Shipley Associates, now McCulley/Cuppan LLC.). Most of my work was at F. Hoffmann La Roche Pharmaceutical in Basel, Switzerland, working as a consultant to their new drug development teams. My role was to facilitate production of massive documentation sets and to work with teams via global team rooms, technology rich environments for text production. Each day, I met with teams via video and linked computers, with team members joining in from France, Germany, England, Switzerland, and the U.S. It was exciting work.
I now regularly consult with major pharmaceutical clients in the U.S. and E.U. (Schering Plough, Vertex, Roche, Aventis, Novartis, Glaxo, Boehringer Ingelheim, SmithKline Beecham, Scotia, Solvay, and others). I work with a group of consultants called McCulley/Cuppan of Salt Lake City, Utah. We help new drug teams keep track of what they know, make the best arguments, and construct the most rhetorically effective documents they can for registration of new drugs. We help them implement best practices in document development, assessment, review practices, and document design. We often formally assess documents for the industry, and we work with them to build rhetorically effective print and online documents.