Swimming Upstream to Train Today's New Tech Comm Professionals

Early-career professionals are arriving in the workplace with experience and degrees in particular disciplines, but increasingly they lack foundational writing skills—even when writing is a core responsibility of the job. These young professionals are surprised by the speed and complexity of work assignments and are unsure how their contributions fit within a quality assurance, quality control workflow. Team leads are caught off guard when writers miss deadlines or turn in incomplete assignments. Employers are scrambling to provide solutions.

In this webinar, I will describe some of the ways I am helping my company address the need for more on-the-job training. In my previous position as a managing editor, which I held for 17 years, I watched my editing team increasingly pinch-hit as writers and subject matter experts as we scrambled to revise confusing language and catch scientific and regulatory errors. I have seen project managers and team leaders become increasingly frustrated about how to help junior staff. A recent job change from managing editor to writer and project manager has given me expanded perspectives from my new seat upstream in the workflow. I can better recognize some of the early missteps that result in poor-quality work landing on the desktops of reviewers and technical editors.

As workflows have reached break-neck speeds and junior staff more and more appear to lack writing skills that used to be a staple of undergraduate and graduate programs, companies must be prepared to assess individual needs and provide more in-house training, coaching, and mentoring so they have a deep bench of writers who are quick and thorough. Proactive companies that recognize the benefit of investing in training will regain lost efficiencies, improve employee retention, and boost revenues. I will share strategies and tools to improve the document creation experience for writers, reviewers, team leads, and project managers, and I will make the case that the key to success is better communication.

Objectives:

• Describe the challenges new writers face.
• Suggest things junior staff can do to take ownership of their work.
• Propose steps team leads and reviewers can take to provide coaching and mentorship

Attendee Takeaways:

• Internal communication is the key to having early-career writing staff who perform well.
• Discussing or—better yet—experiencing various roles in a workflow is beneficial in growing teams and individual contributors.
• Providing a feedback loop that feels safe and supportive is essential.

For current CPTC certificants: This webinar provides 2 CEUs for recertification, in the Project Planning, Written Communication, Reviewing and Editing, and Production Delivery core competency areas.