By Chris Lyons | STC Executive Director
The Society for Technical Communication (STC), in operation for over 62 years with a global membership, can rightly claim to be the preeminent association in the field of technical communication. That being the case, one should expect that STC would have some insights to offer on the state of the field. One easy-to-come-by insight is that the field is changing and that the change is accelerating. But what does that mean? What are the growing job areas? What skills are needed? And along with that, how is STC changing to meet the needs of its members and the field?
The Challenge
Although fairly straightforward questions, delivering solid insights is not easy. Technical communication as a field is most easily embraced as a common set of training among practitioners. Technical communicators work in all industries at multiple levels. They have a variety of responsibilities in their work. They have a wide assortment of job titles. While we have current empirical data that gives us understanding into the state of field, the data’s limitations also make it unable to illuminate the very important changes to the field that STC hears anecdotally. A lack of firm information on changes to technical communication skills and careers makes it equally difficult for STC to respond to those changes.
What’s Been Done
Two current surveys do a good job of profiling the employment of “standard” technical writer and technical communicator jobs. The first is STC’s annual Salary Database of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics employment data. This database, available free to all current STC members, looks at the year-to-year changes in employment numbers, salaries, and locations of workers categorized in the broad, government-approved definition of “technical writer.” The second survey is an article in the November 2015 issue of the Technical Communication journal, “The Evolution of Technical Communication: An Analysis of Industry Job Postings” by Eva Brumberger and Clair Lauer. Their research dissects almost 1,000 U.S. technical communication job postings over a two-month period to detail position titles, location, salary, industry, and other parameters.
Both of these surveys have broadly similar findings. They both determined that the average upper salary for technical communication jobs was in the high $70,000s. They both found that the majority of jobs were in California and Texas. And both found that the largest number of jobs were in the Information Technology Services/Software sector (Brumberger/Lauer) or, as defined by the BLS in the Salary Database, Computer Systems Design and Related Services. The correlation between these data sets is solid information to those in or entering the field about the places they need to be, the skills they need to have, and their paycheck expectations.
However, both of these surveys are limited in their view and are missing important developments in the field. This is no secret, as both surveys describe the limitations of their methodologies. In its discussion of employment, the Salary Database states:
It should be noted that there are some limitations to the employment figures provided by the BLS. While the OES survey gives occupational descriptions for each occupation type, there is still the likelihood of the employment numbers being under-reported. In cases where a technical writer may have skillsets which overlap into multiple profession types, there is no certainty that the respondent will label that individual as a technical writer. STC estimates that there are nearly 600 college-level programs dedicated to technical communication. With graduates being produced from many institutions, there is an inconsistency between the numbers reported by the BLS and the likely higher, “true” employment statistics. (page 11)
The analysis of jobs by Brumberger and Lauer has a similar caveat:
An initial examination of the job descriptions, required education, and desired skill set for these advertisements enabled us to cull duplicate postings as well as postings that were not related to technical communication. We also discarded jobs that were focused primarily on technical/tools work rather than rhetorical work because it is the rhetorical work that is at the heart of technical communication. So, for example, if a posting indicated that the job responsibilities were almost exclusively coding, with little or no design, writing, or client-side communication, then we discarded the job. Additionally, we removed jobs requiring a high level of experience and skills with complex back-end object-oriented programming languages (for example, Java, PHP, C+, Perl), because most graduates of technical communication programs would not have these skills, nor are they at the center of technical communication work. (page 228)
What these caveats tell us is that both the Salary Database and the job posting survey did not factor into their research the rise of technical communication jobs that require a hybrid set of skills.
Jobs requiring a hybrid set of skills—technical communication plus something else—are clearly increasing. Although STC currently has no empirical way of measuring this change, we can see it happening in several areas. One area is “content marketing.” This is a content strategy that eschews the normal sales pitch and instead feeds customers a consistent set of useful information on a product. It communicates a uniform message that links front end marketing to user help or technical specifications. Content marketing requires a hybrid skill set. Practitioners need both technical communication and marketing skills.
Product development for online services is another hybrid area. Companies like Facebook and Google hire information developers who have a mix of technical communication skills and coding skills. In 2014, the Google recruiter at the STC Summit in Phoenix was specifically looking for technical communicators with Java experience—a hybrid skill set. For these types of companies, product teams include technical writers at their formation. Since their product is typically an enhancement to their online service or an analysis of some aspect of the service, every effort touches on coding. The writer needs to be able to participate in the building of the product, not just describe what it does or how to use it on the back end.
A third anecdotal data point is the group of science graduate students running ComSciCon (www.comscicon.com). They have created a highly successful series of workshops centered on “communicating science”—teaching graduate students in the hard sciences how to communicate their efforts and developments to the public. The conference focuses primarily on what STC members would regard as basic technical communication skills. The impetus for their workshops was the realization that they would not be as successful in their careers if they couldn’t clearly communicate in speeches or in articles what they are doing and why it matters. In fact, the entire STEM effort can be said to hinge on the ability to enthuse young people to focus on hard science majors by communicating clearly to them about what is interesting and engaging in the STEM fields. How many fields are including technical communication skills as needed skills for the job? A guess would be: ANY job that is part of a value chain.
There are some “chicken and egg” causality dilemmas to jobs with hybrid skills. Is the key adding marketing to technical communication skills or technical communication to marketing skills? What comes first, coding or technical writing? It may not matter. What is of concern to me as a representative at STC is that we do not have a good way of understanding how many “new” professions are developing over the fault lines between disciplines. How much demand is there for these skill sets? We don’t really know. The surveys mentioned earlier in this article purposely do not try to analyze these types of positions. There is no good data yet to analyze.
What STC Can Do
The Society for Technical Communication exists to provide value to its members. Certainly analyzing and reporting on the development of hybrid skill sets to work in certain fields would be of great value. This analysis has obvious implications for our members looking for a new job, the type of additional training they might decide to pursue, and where they should live. Academia is also very interested in better understanding skills in high demand. A recent survey of programs in the United States by Lisa Meloncon of the University of Cincinnati counted almost 600 college-level programs, graduating thousands of students each year. Each of these programs wants to tailor their curriculum so that their graduates have the skills needed to become employed quickly. There is already some criticism that college programs do not do enough to teach students to use common tools and methodologies in the field. What if they are also missing major areas of study like basic coding? STC itself must better understand changes to the field or the needs of our members will diverge from the value STC offers.
STC does not need to understand the full scope of the field’s changes or even have quantitative analysis in order to start addressing them. We know change is happening, and our efforts to adjust as members’ needs change may not be a true bullseye without some hard data, but that is no excuse for an association to be standing still. In fact, by engaging, STC will be developing insights and data itself. How will STC achieve this?
Professional certification is a good example of our approach. The Certified Professional Technical Communicator (CPTC) program is reopening at the end of 2015. The Foundation-level certification focuses on knowledge of the field. That is knowledge of the field of technical communication not technical communication plus some other field or skill. The Foundation exam tests knowledge in nine core skill areas. We certainly expect many of our members and practitioners to seek Foundation certification; however, our marketing plan is not limited to the technical communicator community or students. By using a global vendor, STC will be publicizing the program to many people in many fields around the world. We expect to find people from other fields studying for and taking the Foundation exam—maybe marketing professionals or graduate students in hard sciences. Over time, we expect the demographic data we collect through the certification program to add to our understanding of other fields that benefit from technical communication skills.
Similarly, and as a direct result of feedback from attendee and member surveys, we have been introducing STC-hosted webinars, classes, and Intercom articles on software development-related subjects such as API development and the Agile methodology. Demand for these topics has been strong. We are considering hosting a pre-conference workshop or even an entire track devoted to programming at our annual Summit. The popularity of these and the survey data we get from attendees will help us understand the need for this training and what types of jobs require it.
Another initiative is to host an event or forum that brings together industry and academia so that managers can define the types of skills they look for when hiring and their relative importance to particular job types. The findings from this type of collaboration would provide very interesting and immediate information on changing and growing roles for technical communicators. We are also surveying the STC Corporate Value Program firms for their input on the skills needed by their employees who are outside of the normal training in technical communication. Again, none of the insights gained will come from a readily available set of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics or even job postings, but real insights can be developed from these types of combined activities.
In many ways, change is a good problem to have. We live in a content-rich world. Technical communication skills are in demand and becoming an essential part of the skill set needed to be successful in many careers—maybe every career. As an association, however, it seems to be increasingly difficult to fully capture and quantify the changes we know are occurring. How can STC, in a single report or survey, competently summarize the huge expansion of career opportunities or the pace of change for our members? We will have to track and report on many data points to draw a picture of the new jobs emerging. How can STC add to or shift its offerings to provide value to its members in the new world of hybrid jobs? We are going to have to sense these changes, adapt, and respond. We need to be agile in developing new programs or changing to respond to member needs. It is really an exciting time for those in the field. Technical communication skills are increasingly desired in many careers and those trained in them are stepping through a gateway that opens to many possible career paths.
What’s over the horizon for the field of technical communication? I think the future is so bright, you’re gonna have to wear shades.
Chris Lyons (chris.lyons@stc.org) is the Executive Director of STC, a position he has held since 2013. His experience and skills span most aspects of program execution from strategic visioning and initiative scoping to project management and risk mitigation. Prior to joining STC, Chris worked for IBM Global Services and he formed The Fairhaven Group, an independent consultancy focused on assisting associations and nonprofits. He also spent nine years in the Navy as an officer and pilot. He earned a BA in economics from the University of Maryland in 1985 and an MBA from the Sloan School of Business at MIT in 1997.
References
Brumberger, Eva, and Claire Lauer. The Evolution of Technical Communication: An Analysis of Industry Job Postings. Technical Communication 62.4 (November 2015): 224–243.
Meloncon, Lisa, and Sally Henschel. Current State of U.S. Undergraduate Defree Programs in Technical and Professional Communication. Technical Communication 60.1 (February 2013): 45–64.
Society for Technical Communication. 2014–2015 Salary Database, www.stc.org/publications/products/salary-database.
