For Technical Writers, The Future Looks Bright

April 3rd, 2012 | Michael Stewart | Jobs, Tech Comm

Last week the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its ‘Jobs Outlook’ for technical writers and let’s just say – it looks bright.

Job growth for technical writers is expected to outpace the national average

Due to predicted growth in the high tech and electronics industries the value of technical communication skills will no doubt rise. In fact, The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts the demand for technical communicators will grow 4% faster than demand for media and communication workers.

“Employment of technical writers is expected to grow 17 percent from 2010 to 2020, about as fast as the average for all occupations.

Employment growth will be driven by the continuing expansion of scientific and technical products and by growth in Web-based product support.

Growth and change in the high-technology and electronics industries will result in a greater need for those who can write instruction manuals and communicate information clearly to users.

Professional, scientific, and technical services firms will continue to grow rapidly and should be a good source of new jobs even as the occupation finds acceptance in a broader range of industries, including data processing, hosting, and related services.”

See the complete report at :http://www.bls.gov/ooh/Media-and-Communication/Technical-writers.htm#tab-1

Poor Documentation Formats (PDF) and the Encyclopedia Britannica

March 15th, 2012 | Damien Howley | Editorial

This week the Encyclopedia Britannica announced the end of the print editions of their encyclopedia. This comes as no surprise. Wikiepedia has proven that web-ready social documentation is far more effective than dead formats.

No, I’m not saying print is dead, but it’s clear that dynamic, easy to update, living documents trump a $1,400 set of dead trees. Literally shipping knowledge in a format that is immediately out of date upon publishing and incapable of being updated or feedback to be easily delivered to the authors makes no sense at all, in this context. It’s quaint for collectors, but not pragmatic or pleasing to users.

PDF is another example of a quaint technology that makes no sense. At least, not when applied to product and technical documentation. It’s a horrible medium that is aggravating to users. Incapable of delivering feedback to the authors. Unsuitable for collaboration. And because it’s not web-ready it can’t be surfaced as contextual help or in support ticketing.

The sooner companies stop using PDF for their tech and help docs the sooner they, like Encyclopedia Britannica, will be giving users what they want.

3 Strategies for Centralizing Tech Comm

February 27th, 2012 | Amanda Cross | Guest Blogger, Let's Talk Techcomm, Tech Comm

Unless you work for a technical communications boutique that specializes in providing technical information solutions to other companies, there’s a decent chance that your boss’s boss doesn’t really understand what you do.

Being helpful makes people want to include you I think that tech writers in most companies are kind of like the IT guy at the dentist’s office: the rest of the folks are smart and capable, but their expertise doesn’t even overlap. The dentists and dental hygienists think IT is probably necessary, but they’re content to just trust the IT guy to take care of it so long as nothing goes wrong.

Some technical writers like it this way. When people are willing to just let you take care of things, they just take your word for what needs to be done and don’t bug you. Plus, there’s the more nefarious notion that keeping your job and job skills a secret gives you job security because no one else will know how to do what you do.

But that only works for as long as people think that what you produce is necessary, which isn’t going to be as long if they don’t understand your contribution. Besides, when people don’t understand what you do, they can’t imagine new and creative ways to utilize your skills. If you can’t capture your boss’s boss’s imagination with all the cool things you have to offer the organization, then opportunities for exciting new projects can be few and far between.

I say it’s better for your career and esteem not to hoard your tech comm knowledge. Instead, you should share your knowledge freely so that people can have a deeper appreciation for why what you do is so difficult and special and ultimately beneficial to everyone. Here are some methods I use to try to make people around me understand the product documentation effort:

#1 – Internal marketing

Well this one’s obvious: if you want people to know what you do, tell them. We are, after all, professional communicators. This ought to be right up our alley.

Speaking for myself, I try to use lots of interesting channels to make people aware of what’s going on in the Doc team. Read more…

3 Skills You Need to be the Master of Your Domain Knowledge

February 16th, 2012 | Amanda Cross | CCMS, Content in Context, Guest Blogger, Tech Comm

Many people want to be good writers. It is a central skill because so much of our communication is done through written channels. Everything from technical documents to emails to tweets requires writing.

Unfortunately, some regard writing as an almost mystical process where inspiration flows from your soul onto the paper where it emerges whole, perfect, and sacred. Thinking about writing this way is convenient, because then your crappy writing is the muse’s fault. But it’s more effective to realize that good writing is rarely beautiful at first. Writing is more like making a sculpture out of clay: you start with a big pile of mucky dirt (the first draft) that you have to mash all around (in a text editor) to get it to look like what you want it to look like.

Like the sculptor, the writer must master the tools—-in this case, words. But mastering words is more abstract than mastering sculpting tools, leading some people to think that mastering words must be an in-born talent that can’t be otherwise learned.

Effective use of words can be learned, though, if the aspiring writer is dedicated, disciplined, and willing to make a whole lot of ugly sculptures en route to making a beautiful one. The fact that you created many unrecognizable blobs when learning the medium might not be romantic, but it doesn’t detract from the artfulness of your eventual works of art.

Skill #1: reducing word count

You know the goal of good technical communication is to make the user successful with your product, and your higher-ups probably know that too. But “making the user successful” is hard to measure, and execs like numbers, so chances are, they’re going to be impressed by your page count. Read more…

Tech Salaries Rising: It’s Time to Harness Data & Share Knowledge

February 9th, 2012 | Barb Mosher | Content in Context, Guest Blogger

A recent salary survey by Dice.com says that senior tech salaries are on the rise. There are a few things we can learn from this change in direction, and it’s not only that good tech people deserve more money.

Harnessing Data…

The Dice Salary survey was conducted online with 8,325 employed technology professionals between September 19 and November 21, 2011. The results showed an average 2% increase in annual wages over 2010 (from $79,384 to $81,327). Bonuses looked even better jumping up 8%.

The salary stats speak volumes about the importance of harnessing data properly for businesses and finding intelligent ways to both understand and use it.

It is our technical people that both create and support the systems that capture big data, and use the tools that analyze it. And it’s big data that many are saying is the key to developing truly great customer experiences. Darren Guaranccia agrees with this saying:“ Today’s analytics compress their collected data into summary statistics to save space. Big data is the promise of retaining this beautifully detailed data, and helping us plumb its depths to better engage and interact with our customers, even in real-time.” Read more…

3 Tips for Navigating the Sea of Résumés

January 31st, 2012 | Amanda Cross | Guest Blogger, Let's Talk Techcomm, Tech Comm

If you’re like me, you can’t hire as many people as you need to do the work. But I’ve just had a writer take another opportunity, and now I have to back fill for him. The good news is there are lots of qualified writers out there right now. The bad news is there are also a lot of people applying for just anything. It can be make the hiring situation kind of overwhelming, but I have some tips that I, unfortunately, learned the hard way.

Tip #1: Recognize your job is hard

The biggest mistake I made in my first couple hires was to think that my job was standard fare that anyone could handle. I felt like I was being overdramatic to spend too much time vetting the candidates, when it seemed like it just couldn’t be that hard. Anyone would do.

The tricky thing here is that technical communicators have a very wide variety of skills and a broad spectrum of capabilities. A person can have the title “Technical Writer” and have it mean anything from “I know the source code inside and out, help customers directly with technical issues, and consult with the product manager on the direction and design of the product” to “I get a rough draft from an SME and add page breaks in the right places.” Read more…

Content in Context: Support & Sell Without the Sales/Marketing Pitch

January 26th, 2012 | Barb Mosher | Content in Context, content strategy, Guest Blogger

When it comes to customer support for products and services, most organizations look to support processes such as online communities, help documentation, customer forums, etc.. But are these tools being used to their best advantage? The truth is, in most cases, they aren’t.

Moving Support into Sales & Marketing

We often take for granted the content used in support processes. Take help documentation as a prime example. It’s probably one of the most hated jobs in the organization, creating help documentation. Nobody reads it, it’s impossible to keep up to date as patches, bug fixes and major updates are completed. It’s shoved in static help documentation files, and placed on CDs, DVDs or in hard to reach places on the website. Is it ever read by a customer? Do they find it useful?

Tech writers and organizations should be happy to know that it doesn’t have to be this way. Read more…

Motivating SMEs (even though you can’t fire them!)

January 24th, 2012 | Amanda Cross | Guest Blogger, Let's Talk Techcomm, Tech Comm

In the valiant pursuit of providing excellent product help and other documents, just about every technical communicator out there works with subject matter experts (SMEs). Talking to experts is a normal part of the research for writing a technical document. SMEs are an invaluable resource, but can be challenging to work with sometimes. After all, whatever makes them experts in the first place has the potential to also make them:

Very busy and hard to get in contact with
Frustrated with people who don’t already understand the subject matter
Downright arrogant

working together is a matter of habit My own favorite SME quotes come from back when I was in college. I wrote technical manuals for a high-energy physics lab on campus. Once, after reading my first draft of a document about a piece of machinery in the lab, my supervisor told me, “It’s clear you don’t understand this at all.” That was harsh, but not really rude (and certainly not untrue). It was another time, when a grad student said to me, “I can’t understand why you’re having trouble with this; it’s trivial” that I really got to experience that I’m-too-smart-and-busy-to-bother-with-insects-like-you attitude that some technical writers deal with every day.

Fortunately, there are approaches that you, the technical communicator, can take into your interactions with SMEs to encourage responsiveness and respectfulness, even though you probably don’t have any actual authority over your SMEs.

Prerequisite: be a writer SMEs want to work with

Before you can start pulling the levers of motivating your SMEs, there are a few things you need to do to prepare yourself.
Read more…

A Conversation with Corey Ganser: TechWhirl Interview at LavaCon

January 23rd, 2012 | Allison Dickherber | Awards and Press, Community News, Conferences

One of our own, Corey Ganser, presented “Who Cares about Your Content?” at LavaCon this year. An interview with Corey was recently published on TechWhirl. In it, he stresses the steps content strategists and technical communicators must take in order to prove their worth and get the recognition they deserve. Here’s an excerpt from Corey’s TechWhirl interview: “Building the Business Case for Technical Communicators by Leveraging Talent, Skills and Passion”

Use Analytic Data of Content to Prove your Worth

Demonstrating value is crucial in the field of technical documentation. Corey suggests Tech communicators push project managers to include a content plan alongside their technology plan, financial plan, and product development plan… Backed by the data, “technical communicators can sit at the big table with the managers,” Corey says, and prove themselves as valuable resources for the company. As a result, a technical communicator can quantify the value of wearing multiple hats, and demonstrate how that their time, money, and energy are effectively being spent to benefit the company’s bottom line.

Corey continued by recommending that technical communicators prove their value to the company in various aspects. “People need to re-define their contribution to a company as a technical communicator. For example [technical communicators] often get caught up with buzzwords and instead need to think strategically as a content strategist about how users can interact with the company who produces the product.”

Documentation Should Help, Not Function as an Afterthought

In our interview, Corey focused on how documentation is often perceived as an afterthought. Read more…

Conditional Formatting and Single Sourcing

January 20th, 2012 | Damien Howley | CCMS, TCS Features

Recently I read a discussion thread at a LinkedIn Tech Comm group in which Aaron, my CEO, claimed MindTouch didn’t support single sourcing. He was promptly contradicted by a MindTouch customer, Amanda Cross of ExactTarget, and prominent Tech Comm leader who just kicked off a guest blog series here at the MindTouch blog. Later on another MindTouch customer from EMC echoed Amanda’s call that they too use MindTouch for single sourcing.