Have you heard? Editors Canada has launched a subsite called the Career Development Hub (the Hub), a user-friendly webpage for members that collects career-building resources for all types of editors, in all industries and at all stages, whether student affiliate or advanced. In this post, Alex Benarzi, Lynne Melcombe and Holly Vestad explain how the Hub came to be.
The idea germinated at the 2012 annual general meeting, when attendees agreed to strike a task force dedicated to helping members find work. We would have a year to propose a way to connect members with career-building opportunities. A year later, we had a plan and the career builder committee was born.
Editors Canada has produced a vast array of career-building resources: articles in Active Voice, Editors’ Weekly blog posts, webinars, conference materials and more. But they were spread out and disorganized. What was missing was a way for a member to say, “This is my career stage; this is the industry that interests me. Connect me with the resources that will help me formulate a specific goal and a plan to work toward it.”
We started by creating a content inventory of existing career resources — a huge task. We then labelled resources by career stage and industry, and slotted them into categories:
- Build Your Community: networking resources
- Build Your Skills: knowledge and training resources
- Build Your Portfolio: finding-work resources
We envisioned a hub — a freestanding page connected to the association website — where every member, of every experience level and in every industry, could plug in their parameters and instantly locate the resources that would help them move toward their goal. It would also allow the association to identify and fill gaps, keep existing resources up to date and identify emerging areas requiring new resources.
Budgetary constraints, the website redesign and other events proposed new challenges and new opportunities. But over the years, the committee sourced additional material to fill the three categories, updated old links, organized the materials into subcategories for ease of access and created descriptive blurbs. “Build Your Portfolio” transformed into “Find Work” to emphasize this focus of the hub. A section was added concerning inclusivity, diversity, equity and accessibility (IDEA) that reflects the growing need and benefit of including IDEA in an editing practice. A section on book coaching was also included to reflect this developing option for editors. A front page was created to provide easy access to the most-used links, including the National Job Board, Discord and Chicago Manual of Style, among others.
All this work has crystallized into the Hub as you see it today, found at career.editors.ca. The career builder committee has volunteers dedicated to ensuring the Hub remains up to date and relevant. The Hub is designed by us and for us, and we want it to be relevant for everyone. We thus welcome feedback — via the contact form at the bottom of the home page — about how to improve from all editors at every stage in their career. Do you have a recommended resource? Do you think we should include a new section? We want to hear about it!
The Hub has been a long labour of love, and we’re thrilled to see it launch.
Want to volunteer for the Hub?
The career builder committee is always looking for new volunteers. Email Holly, the chair, to see how you can get involved: careerbuilder@editors.ca. She looks forward to hearing from you!
About the co-authors
Alex Benarzi is an editor, writer and educator. He works with creative and professional writers, providing holistic edits for fiction writers, memoirists, academics and solopreneurs. Alex is passionate about creating accessible, inclusive and affective communities, bringing writers, editors and publishers together in an increasingly isolated world.
Previous article by Alex Benarzi: The Power of Affective Communities in Editing
Lynne Melcombe is an author, editor and writing coach. She works with self-publishing novices and seasoned authors as well as with government, post-secondary, non-profit and corporate clients. Her first book, No Such Thing: A Memoir of “mild” Traumatic Brain Injury and My Twenty-Year (so far) Recovery will be published in 2026. She lives in Port Coquitlam, B.C.
Previous article by Lynne Melcombe: An Update on the ODE
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Previous article by Holly Vestad: We Ask a Book Coach: Part 3
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