Michael Harvey offers a good starting point for talking about marketable skills and business value in our profession. His latest article Timeless Skills for Technical Writers suggests that writing (or communicating) is our crucial skill. He starts with some good questions “What skills should technical communicators cultivate to ensure their market value? Is there a single set of skills that would weather whatever market and technological turbulence occurs?” But there is more to explore here and this is worth fleshing out a bit. So many people misunderstand what technical communication is, because they limit it to a subset of activities, and Michael Harvey’s article does not go far enough to clear this up. The truth is a bit deeper and more challenging and more fun. If you would like my advice, read on.
Everyone must write (or at least communicate)
The current business environment that expects all professionals at a given level to communicate should not be characterized as aiming for the lowest common denominator with the attitude that “Anyone can write.” Instead, business is aiming for the bottom line and a more accurate characterization would be that in the information age, “All must write.” It does not make sense for software companies or pharmaceutical manufacturers or any number of innovative start ups in the Research Triangle Park area to have only a limited number of staff who can communicate. Where we as full-time communicators can make a difference is by helping everyone in the organization communicate better. We can help with any number of these:
- helping them write more clearly
- directing them as to what document types can best contain the content
- showing how to maximize content flow with process issues (including process documentation)
- automating content development, presentation, delivery and maintenance
While I agree with Michael’s statement that “The ability to communicate clearly, correctly, conversationally, and concisely will never lose market value.”, I don’t think that thinking about a technical writer acting as an individual is the most helpful. That ability is valuable because everyone in the organization must be doing it effectively. And we must be doing it together. A better way to say this is that our skill set will not lose market value because “The job of a technical communicator (in partnership with all stakeholders in the conversation) is never done.”
Writing is not our only skill
Writing is not our only skill – it is only half of our job title and less than half of our skill set. Technical writing is not just writing. It is technical AND it is writing. We do not, like writers, have months to compose a manuscript. We do not have that kind of time to research a product or service and produce a user guide, or to implement a content management system, or to figure out social media for engaging with our customers. We do not have the luxury of sitting in our own room and writing, all alone and undisturbed. We must interact with all the stakeholders and make the subject matter expert’s “subject” real. We have milestones and deadlines. If we are ambitious, we find the bottlenecks and fix them; we write the topics that help the most; we talk to technical support to get the user’s perspective as well as talking to the subject matter expert. We develop style guidelines where they make sense to make everyone’s job easier. We do a range of tasks that help companies make money and engage customers. As Michael knows, many of us are not writing for the general public but a specific audience that requires content at a certain level of business context and technical knowledge. We work with a range of personnel and the task of communication is getting more social and more online.
Time(less) is money(less)
I disagree that our only timeless skill is writing. How we write and what we write will change over time. The business environment is changing and so should we. The only timeless skill in our profession is adapting or learning (and learning to change). There are no skills, like writing, that will keep you employed. Every company and every market has variations and you have to go with the flow. Within a company, I would recommend that you find out what that company prizes most highly and start writing about it. If it is product, then write about the product; if it is service to customer, write about how to improve that. When you write about stuff inside a company, you will find an audience, because people in a company need information, and if you are generating it, you are valuable.
In the larger marketplace, you can become more valuable by learning the tools and techniques and best practices that are used by most technical writers. In its day, Interleaf was great for book authoring and publishing. But times have changed and we must help with other aspects of content development, delivery, and maintenance. So what are the tools most often used in our industry?
- online help
- authoring
- doc repository
- content management
- social media
- basic business communication tools (frequently MS Office tools)
Are you fluent in the best of those? I do not agree that writing alone is what will keep us employed. Technical writing means knowing the technology about which we are writing and knowing the technology used to develop that content. It is not one or the other. It is both. That is what defines us and what makes us valuable.
Michael’s advice about writing every day is a good start. But don’t stop with that. Try these:
- help someone find information every day
- write in as many places and media as possible – not everything belongs in a doc.
(If there is a wiki or intranet or internal blog, put it there. if a video would work better than a procedural doc, consider making a short video.) - find a way to make it easier to find information
- teach someone how to help information flow
- learn some aspect of the technology every day
- learn the new rhetoric – keywords and online page ranking
- learn how to create filters – pare down content to the essential information and help others do the same
And I know Michael would agree with this piece of advice that applies when talking about how to be valuable and leverage your skill set as a technical writer: Find a mentor. This is a great way to find out if you are well rounded with a good portfolio and a proven skill set. A mentor can help you gauge how marketable your skill set is and where you can improve. Michael Harvey is one such mentor and I challenge him to write more about our profession. He knows I will be there to make sure his communication is concise and complete.
Pingback: Tweets that mention Valuing the Total Technical Writer | Ideas in the Making -- Topsy.com
I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past few day, because it relates to the very thing that I’m struggling the most with in my job right now. Bill, you raise a lot of good points, but ultimately, I agree with Michael on this.
It’s certainly true that technical communicators must adapt to changing technology and changing business needs. But at our core, what separates technical communicators from other technical people (who could quite easily handle the tasks associated with content management, for example) is our ability to turn engineering and marketing material into clear, user-friendly prose.
In this era of just-in-time, good-enough documentation, our skills are needed more than ever to ensure that the content meets some minimum standard of readability. And if we don’t do that, we’re not technical communicators anymore. We’re just technologists.
Our communication skills are our raison d’etre. They’re why we’re doing these jobs and not someone else. Certainly, if we don’t adapt how we use our communication skills in a changing business environment, we’ll lose out. But at the same time, we have to stand up for what’s right for the customer — we have to decide what constitutes “good enough.”
The fact that “all must write” means that a lot of poorly written material is getting published these days — probably more poorly written material than well written material. The temptation is strong to lower our standards because our customers have gotten used to reading garbage. To be honest, I think all the garbage on the Web has actually lowered people’s tolerance for it. As soon as they come across a passage that’s poorly written or unclear, they stop reading and look for the information elsewhere. So if anything, our ability to write well is even more important now, because our customers have more choices than before. And if we don’t stand up for the importance of producing easy-to-read content, no one else in the organization will.
A lot of people like technology, and a lot of people like to write. But there’s a tiny subset of those two groups that likes to do both. That’s us. Our jobs require us to use technology well if we want to stay employed. But we’re the ones who have to enforce the standards of good writing. If you let a dangling participle stand because you’re on a deadline, then you let the profession down. If you let an ambiguous passage slip by you, then you let the customer down. We may end up being the only ones who recognize how much our writing skills improve the content. But that’s no excuse for hiding behind metrics and KPIs. Bill’s right that your writing skills won’t keep you employed, and that’s the scary part. You have to value your writing even when no one else does. Because your customers need that from you, and so does your company, even if they don’t know it.
It’s okay to talk about what separates us from other technical people; how about also talking about what separates us from other writers? Technical writers are not valuable because they can write alone nor because they can handle technical material, but because we can do BOTH. You said it, Andrea, when you said “a tiny subset of those two groups that likes to do both”. That’s our value. Michael’s not wrong, he’s just doing something many of us do and that is under estimate our value by only acknowledging part of it. I think you are very right when you say we are needed now more than ever.
I love good writing, and I wish I could say that Andrea is right. But her comments sound eerily like what the TechComm community was saying 20 years ago: we’re special, but nobody understands us. That attitude didn’t serve us well. We had to come to terms with our true business value, and we had to figure out how to demonstrate that value to our employers.
The fact that people are more willing to tolerate bad writing on the web, suggests to me that good writing has less value — not more. Again, I wish it weren’t so. But I’m afraid it is. While I don’t agree with every single word that Bill wrote, I think he’s got it right: Writing skill by itself isn’t enough to make us valuable or even viable in today’s marketplace. If we can find a way to change that, I’ll come a-rejoicing. But I don’t think we will.
Maybe I take clarity of communication more seriously than most technical communicators do. Nearly all the instructional material I produce contains the sentence, “Failure to follow these instructions will result in death or serious injury.” Technical communicators in the software industry generally don’t have to worry about that (although some do).
If it’s true that anyone can write, then it’s equally true that anyone can use technology. When it comes to technical communication, the job requirements themselves screen out good writers who don’t have good technical skills. The people who worry me are the ones who can use the tools but don’t write well. They’re the ones who could undermine our profession.
My point — and Michael’s too, I think — is that technology is ephemeral, while communication skills are eternal. Twenty years from now, my expertise in unstructured FrameMaker 8 will be utterly worthless. But my writing skills will be as useful then as they are now.
But will my writing skills sell my value in the marketplace? Sadly, no. The market doesn’t value my writing skills. But the day I stop valuing my writing skills is the day I need to look for a different profession. Because I will not serve my company or my customers if I decide that writing sentences that people can actually understand is not worth the effort.