By Jack Molisani | Fellow
Conference program committees (whether for an association conference like the STC Summit or for other industry conferences) face an interesting challenge: choosing sessions in which our audience will be interested months (if not years) in advance of the conference itself. And considering that attendees first have to ask for permission and funds to attend, the challenge then becomes: In what topics will the audience be interested that are also relevant enough to their employer’s corporate goals so their bosses will pay for them to attend?
This second challenge reminds me of a lesson I learned in a screenplay writing class I took when I first moved to Los Angeles. You have two audiences when writing a screenplay. Eventually people must be interested enough to pay to see the film, but first you need a producer interested enough to buy the rights to your script and get it produced.
The same principle applies to building a business case to “sell” your purchase request to management, whether attending a three-day conference or buying an enterprise-
wide content management system that will take three years to define and implement.
The third (and hardest) challenge to face when planning a conference program is to keep in mind that there is much in your industry that you don’t know, to keep your eyes and ears open for new ways to do things, for new ideas and new information—some of which may challenge data that “everyone knows is true.” I’ll bet you that STC Summit Conference Chair Todd Deluca and STC Director of Education and Meetings Molly Jin are making similar discoveries while producing the 2016 STC Annual Summit—what you (the attendee) needs to know, and why you should attend.
In addition to producing a conference, I’m also a recruiter who specializes in content professionals (technical writers, content strategists, etc.) As a recruiter, I see what skills companies want in the candidates they are hiring (and how many they are hiring), so that also gives me an insight into industry trends. This article summarizes my discoveries in both jobs over the past year.
Job Posting Trends
Before we look at more anecdotal lessons learned, let’s investigate some hard numbers on how the job market has changed over the past decade. I ran an analysis on technical writing and content strategist job postings on the major job boards (CareerBuilder, Monster, and DICE) and then compared the numbers to the same search I did in 2006. (Note: I didn’t search for “content strategist” in 2006, but I suspect the results would have been zero as Google shows the term “content strategist” not becoming common until 2010; see Figure 1.)
In Tables 1 and 2, I suspected these “content strategist” jobs were mostly Web content strategy jobs, so I reran the search for “content strategists” jobs with “multichannel” or “multi-channel” as keywords and found the results shown in Table 3. In Tables 3 through 6, which show the addition of skill-based keywords used in job postings, I had anticipated the decrease in the number of technical writing jobs and the decline of online help, WinHelp, HTML Help, etc., but the lack of growth in XML/content management system job requirements took me by surprise since that seems to be a “hot” topic at conferences. How few content strategy jobs included multichannel publishing also surprised me. From this I deduce that, while there is growth in content strategy jobs, the positions are focused on Web content strategy, not multichannel (techcomm and Web) content strategy. And these numbers are very different from Adobe’s survey of the state of structured authoring.
The State of Structured Authoring
While most of the content strategy jobs on the job boards are Web-related, there are companies that are adopting true multichannel publishing using content management systems and structured authoring. Praveen Kumar Burri, the product manager for the Adobe Technical Communication Suite, presented a TED-like talk at LavaCon in October 2015 on Trends in Structured Authoring.
The first trend Praveen identified was that 49% of the organizations who participated in the survey are already doing structured authoring, a 30% growth year to year:
Figure 3 shows, of those already using structured authoring, the standard they prefer. DITA is the most common at 57%.
The slide in Figure 4 shows the size of companies that are currently publishing (or planning to) using structured authoring. Figure 5 reports on the types of deliverables produced and to which outputs they are published.
Figure 6 shows which outputs were expected to continue to grow, with an increasing percentage reporting mobile publishing.
According to Praveen, companies are moving to structured authoring for the following reasons:
- Efficiency: content reuse
- Conistency: easy to update
- Multichannel Publishing: multiple formats, languages, and platforms
- Cost Savings: translation and content reuse
(For more information on trends in structured authoring, see the recording of Praveen’s talk at: http://tinyurl.com/SATrends.)
While Adobe’s data on the grown of structured authoring is similar to studies done by other organizations like Scriptoriun, SDL, and the Content Wrangler (see Figure 7), the data doesn’t explain why there are so few structured authoring jobs on the major job boards.
Why is there a disparity? My guess is that companies who are doing structured authoring are looking for core technical writing skills in job postings, and then training new hires on whatever particular content authoring system they are using. This is a major shift from ten years ago, when the average technical writer job posting simply said, “Technical writer needed. Must know FrameMaker and RoboHelp.”
So far we’ve looked at techcomm hiring trends as well as trends in structured authoring. The next section discusses one more major trend—the growth of cross-silo collaboration.
The Growth of Collaboration
Collaboration is becoming more important in structured authoring as companies begin to implement cross-silo content strategies, and tool vendors begin to offer authoring environments in which subject matter experts and other contributors can create structured content. For example, Stilo International just launched AuthorBridge, an easy-to-use tool that enables people with no knowledge of DITA to create and maintain DITA content (www.stilo.com/authorbridge).
Over the past few years, content strategists and consultants have advocated “breaking down content silos.” While breaking down organizational silos is a grand idea, in my opinion it’s just never going to happen. Instead, we need to bring representatives from the various content silos (tech comm, marketing, tech support, training, etc.) together at the same table, wherein technical communication has an equal seat and voice, like a “United Nations of Content.” In such an environment, technical communication would have an equal voice with other content silos. And by having all silos at the table, companies could finally have an opportunity to overcome resistance to change and (with the participation of all at the table) create a true enterprise-wide content strategy.
Another approach to spanning content silos emerged from a discussion with Joe Gollner from Gnostyx and Cruce Saunders from Simple [A], where organizations can adopt an object-oriented approach to sharing content. Perhaps enterprise-level APIs (application programming interfaces) could be created that would enable business units to share content, regardless of how that content is stored “inside” the organizational object. (For more information about object-oriented programming, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming.)
Or perhaps a service-oriented architecture (SOA) would be a better analogy. SOA is “a paradigm for organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership domains. It provides a uniform means to offer, discover, interact with and use capabilities to produce desired effects con-
sistent with measurable preconditions and expectations” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-oriented_architecture).
While a whole issue of Intercom could be dedicated to the topics of content modeling, storage, and extraction, the point I am trying to illustrate is the clear need for content professionals who become more involved at the enterprise level.
A Seat at the Table
Does your company need a Chief Content Officer or a cross-silo unified content strategy? I’m guessing yes, and that person could be you. If so, it’s time you claimed your seat at the United Nations of Content table!
Jack Molisani was a project officer in the Space Division of the USAF before starting ProSpring Technical Staffing, an employment agency (http://prospringstaffing.com). He has a degree in computer engineering from Tulane University in New Orleans, is an STC Fellow, and a member of the Project Management Institute. Jack also produces The LavaCon Conference on Content Strategy and TechComm Management, a yearly conference founded in 2002 to help businesses solve content-related problems (http://lavacon.org).
