Vanier Micro Media students display their work and show that times are changing

Working in an office is not what it used to be. Local companies that would like to give their company a modern look should come to Vanier College and see the future. Graduating students of the Vanier Micro Media program are having an exhibition of their work on Thursday, May 10 from 4 to 7:30 p.m., and that is the ideal place to see what skills are now needed to run an efficient, modern office in the year 2007.

Gone are the days of shorthand, dictation, and filing. At Vanier College more design-oriented programs incorporating web design, document design and office skills replaced the old secretarial courses almost ten years ago. Now students study Micropublishing and Hypermedia to learn what it takes to work in a modern office environment.

Web page design, document, report and label design, desktop publishing and page layout, newsletters, internal publications and forms design are all the new skills office technologists now need if they are to find work in this field. “Technology changes quickly and these students are ready to keep up with the demands of today,” states Joan Taylor, Vanier College coordinator of the Micropublishing and Hypermedia Program. “Nowadays business and design work together and at Vanier College students are learning both."

What happened and where are companies headed that the modern office has changed that much? Design, design, design is what much of the work in a modern company is now about. Of course there are data programs to know how to use and manipulate, and office assistants need to be able to write correctly in French and English, but with many executives looking after their own email and therefore taking care of their own correspondence, secretaries have taken on surprising new responsibilities. They often have to design documents, design the page layout of reports, update web pages for the company and work with helping to create the company image.

The key words today are business communication, web design and graphic design, and the key tools are Microsoft Office, QuarkXPress, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and Acrobat, Macromedia Dreamweaver, and Flash. Welcome to the 21st Century! See it in the Vanier College Student Mall, F 100, May 10, 4pm to 7:30pm.

Vanier Communications Office