By Neil Perlin | Fellow
This column presents overviews of new technologies that may affect technical communicators in the near future. If you have feedback, or would like to suggest topics for subsequent columns, please contact Neil Perlin at nperlin@concentric.net.
When I entered the field of technical communication in the late 1970s, career management was simple. Get a job, then accumulate experience and longevity to enter the management track as a doc group manager or the consulting track as a consulting technical writer. All this took place within the stable confines of a supportive company, with stable or slowly changing technology. Not anymore.
Today, of course, companies have downsized techcomm groups, sub-specialties like editing or indexing have almost vanished in many companies, and the technology continues to evolve. How do we manage our careers in an environment like this?
What follows is based on my own experience and that of other technical communicators I’ve met, some in passing and some who’ve become friends. Take what best fits you out of the discussion that follows.
Select Your Business Model
Decide whether you want a permanent job or a position as a contractor or consultant. Most people look for permanent positions because of the benefits and supposed stability. But if you plan to become a contractor or consultant, look for permanent jobs very carefully because those jobs will have to give you experience in the subject and tools that you want to take into contracting/consulting and expose you to skills like project management as well.
Also be aware of the difference between being a contractor and a consultant. Contractors work through a contract agency that handles placement, invoicing, and so on, and they generally work on site for the client. In contrast, consultants handle their own placement, invoicing, etc., and often work off site. If work-based socialization is important to you, consulting may not be a good choice.
If you’re considering becoming a consultant, evaluate yourself to see if you’re really suited for that much independence. How much autonomy do you want? How much isolation can you take? Are you expecting the freedom to come and go as you please? (Every consultant I know works 60 or more hours per week.)
Define Your Work Type Broadly
Plan to focus on a type of work rather than a specific tool. For example, don’t be a Framemaker user, be a technical communicator who uses Framemaker and Word. That way, you won’t be left without work if the market isn’t offering any Framemaker jobs but is awash in Word jobs. Be flexible.
Brand Yourself
Branding yourself sets the image that people have of you. Do whatever possible to be sure that when a prospective employer or client thinks “API documentation” or “online help development,” your name pops up in their mind. (That doesn’t mean that you’ll get the job, but you want to be “top of mind.”)
There are many ways to brand yourself. Some, such as creating a website or brochures, clearly apply to contractors and consultants but not if you have a real job. Social media can be tricky. Here are some ideas, with the first four applying no matter what your position is.
- Do good work—This is so obvious that it can go unsaid, but it’s crucial. Your reputation, based on the quality of your work and your personal reliability and professionalism, will get around. You need to be sure that what gets around is good.
- Practice public speaking—When people see you speak, assuming you do a good job, they’ll brand you as an expert in your topic. Your local STC chapter, or other professional organization, is a logical place to try public speaking. It’s an audience that deals with a subject in which you have expertise, so you’re starting out with a friendly audience. Plus, chapters are always looking for (and will even help develop) new speakers on new topics.
- Write articles—This is similar to public speaking in that people will ascribe expertise to the author of an article that they read in a professional journal. Professional journals like Intercom or your local STC chapter newsletter are always open to new topics by new authors.
- Attend professional society meetings—In professional associations like STC, membership and meeting attendance reflect cultural shifts. In the late 1990s, people had to formally join and attend professional societies because alternatives like social media and meetups didn’t exist. Today, those alternatives make it less imperative to attend a professional society meeting, but physically attending meetings lets people put your face to your name. I know people who’ve gotten a jump on a job that was announced at a meeting because they were there in person. And don’t just attend meetings that have to do with writing. Attend meetings of groups that focus on the topics about which you write. For example, if you document accounting software, go to STC meetings but also go to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (www.aicpa.org/Pages/default.aspx) meetings to keep abreast of the direction of the profession.
- Leverage social media—Social media can be a great place to brand yourself, often with little effort. The easiest way to do so, in my experience, is by joining writing groups and groups related to your industry on LinkedIn and contributing when someone posts a question. You can also post on Twitter and in Facebook groups and, a bit unexpectedly, Pinterest (where I occasionally pin the front pages of apps I’ve created). A caveat with social media participation may lie in your company policies. Many companies that I speak with or read about, especially in finance or banking, have very restrictive policies about social media posting due to the chance that an employee may post a response to a question, and the response could be taken as expressing the company’s position and put the company at legal risk. Talk to your manager and legal department before creating a social media profile that mentions your workplace.
Broaden Your Skills Beyond Your Current Tools
Tool skills are obviously vital but you shouldn’t stop at just learning a tool. Extend your learning to the technologies that underlie tools and that create the technical environment in which you work. For example:
- Learn about CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), which forms a major part of almost all XML authoring tools. That will make it easier to transition from help authoring tool A to B when you change jobs.
- Learn about HTML5 in order to understand why HTML5 is supplanting WebHelp for online help publishing.
- Learn about nontechnical things that affect the business environment in which you work. For example, even a basic background in finance and strategic planning can help shed light on trends on the industry or things your company may do.
- Prepare for the future by reading company news releases and technical journal articles. They’re always interesting and might even open up unexpected career doors. For example:
- In 2010, after having been in mobile since 1998, I found a write-up of a tool called Google App Inventor that was the first GUI app development tool. (Imagine a version of Flare or RoboHelp aimed at app development and you’ve got the idea.) A year later, I was a certified app developer for an app authoring tool company outside Boston. Simply reading trade journals opened that door.
- Within five days in late March, I found and posted on social media a short article that introduced the five main standards behind the Internet of Things (IoT). I also learned about a new virtual reality (VR) tool from Google called Cardboard that lets me view VR through an Android smartphone. I ordered one, for about $14, and it is the subject of my next column in the June issue of Intercom. I may never get involved with IoT or VR, but I can think of many uses for VR within technical communication, and this will give me a fast and cheap introduction to the experience and the development tools.
Take Responsibility for Your Career
Finally, and most importantly, is the need to take responsibility for your own career. In the day when we worked for large, supportive companies, it was easy to fall into the trap of tailoring our career decisions to the options that the company provided or of letting the company pay for things and abandoning those things when the company stopped paying for them, such as membership or professional conferences. Two suggestions come to mind in this situation:
- Do the career options offered by the company meet your career desires? If not, then you have to take charge of your career by doing the other things I describe in the column, and more.
- If the company stops paying for membership or conference attendance, then you have to decide whether the benefit of that membership or conference is worth paying for yourself. If it is, then that becomes your responsibility.
Summary
Technical communication isn’t what it used to be. In exchange for less career stability and predictability, we’ve gotten access to challenging technologies like online help and the Web, and emerging new ones like virtual and augmented reality, apps, structured authoring, output automation, and more. But one side effect has been that we now have to drive our own careers in order to take advantage of these opportunities. It will call for new ways of thinking, but the result will be continued challenge and job growth into the future. Personally, I look forward to this for many years to come.
NEIL PERLIN (nperlin@nperlin.cnc.net) is president of Hyper/Word Services (www.hyperword.com) of Tewksbury, MA. He has 36 years of experience in technical writing, with 30 in training, consulting, and developing for online formats and tools including WinHelp, HTML Help, JavaHelp, CE Help, XML, RoboHelp, Flare, and others. Neil is MadCap-certified for Flare and Mimic, Adobe-certified for RoboHelp, and Viziapps-certified for the ViziApps mobile app development platform. He is an STC Fellow and the founder and manager of the Beyond the Bleeding Edge track, which ran at the STC Summit from 1999 until 2014.
