As part of the Recovery Package offered this year, STC members were asked to write on one of three topics. The answers were extremely interesting; a few are presented below to perhaps prod your own thoughts on the subject. The first topic is, “What I Believe Are the Most Important Skills Technical Communicators Need for the Future.” Read some thoughts below and discuss: What do you think are the most important skills?
The Internet and World Wide Web are now normal parts of our environment. But their successors—the various social networking tools and sites—engender the skills we need to master next. In the very near future, it will be enough to learn how to use Twitter and Facebook effectively in technically useful ways. But social networking is merely the beginning of the next revolution of digital communication, one where developers and users, communicators, and researchers interact in a much more intimate and communal fashion. And technical communicators, by their nature, have the opportunity to lead this next revolution. We are already equipped with both the skills and the background to master the current communication tools. Our next major challenge will be to both define this next generation of communication and create the skill set for tools we haven’t even envisioned.
—Sky Hughes
I believe that the most important technical communication skill will be a disciplined curiosity. Disciplined curiosity is hot and in-demand, because the audience can be assumed to be bogged in the mire of too much information. The communicator whose attention uncovers mysteries rather than creating new ones will be sought after. As always, one must select one’s topics and research questions so as to provide new insight in useful context and stimulate further questions.
Careful development of this classic storyteller’s skill will continue to work to lift human beings toward a better future. The value of contagious curiosity is that it will always underlie and transcend technology.
—Hilary Ziols
My thoughts probably reflect a manager’s mindset and the concept of technical communications, training and development, and instructional design fields fitting under one “Learning” umbrella.
A technical communicator/learning professional will need to:
- Think of oneself as a business. Be an effective self-marketer that can explain the value and ROI of education to an organization as well as demonstrate that value through his/her work.
- Be a more sophisticated negotiator of contract, salary, and benefit packages.
- Be versatile in the types of projects one can do and manage.
- Establish strong relationships and work with global teams that have domain experts in multiple countries.
- Recognize what content is critical to the audience in order to deliver content in frequent stages and adjust priorities accordingly.
- Develop quicker and lower cost ways of training students using formal and informal methods.
—Nathan Emerson
Important future skills for technical communicators will mirror useful past and current skills, including understanding that:
- “Technical” is as important as “communication.”
- Everything communicates, not just the words we create.
- Skills are more valuable than tool knowledge.
- Knowledge is a never-ending quest; never stop learning.
- User happiness is a more important concept than user needs, which is a more important concept than user tasks.
- Fundamentals are more important than buzzwords.
- Editors are your friend—and as necessary to you as QA is to programmers.
As always, skills we’ll need include writing, visual communication, project management, time management, programming/engineering, cognitive psychology, human-computer interaction, communication styles, social media, and the ability to communicate correctly, clearly, concisely, and comprehensively.
—Chuck Martin
The technical communicator of the future must, of course, possess the basic skills to write in a clear and concise manner that effectively conveys the meaning of the idea, procedure, or process being expressed. The technical communicator must also have skills, including the abilities to organize ideas and concepts for the subject matter, to identify the intended audience and to communicate effectively to that audience, and to graphically illustrate an idea or effectively manage that process. The technical communicator of the future must also pay attention to all peripheral processes that are secondary to the core subject matter. Another essential skill is to write or to present the material in a way that makes any person in the intended audience feel comfortable with the material and in a way that is thoroughly and readily understood.
—Steven J. Koester
