By Shamreen (Shammy) Pradhan
I had the opportunity to chat with Stephanie Rosenbaum, CEO of TecEd, about her professional career progression from her accidental start in technical communication to her current role at TecEd. We discussed challenges she has faced, changes within the industry, and professional societies that have impacted her career.
Career Beginnings
Shammy: Thanks for taking the time to chat with me, Stephanie. I am sure you have gotten an idea of my questions for you from our prior correspondences, so we can dive right into it. My first question is why did you choose to go into the technical communication field, and was it your first choice?
Stephanie: Oh my goodness. I didn’t even know technical communication existed when I got my first job in it. I had been working my way through college as a biochemistry lab technician because my dad was a chemist and I had learned in high school how to work in a lab. I couldn’t make ends meet working part time, and I was an out of state student, so I took a gap year, which at that time would qualify me for in-state tuition.
I started looking for a full-time job as a lab technician, and instead I found a company that was looking for a technical writer. This was interesting because I was moderately technical, and I was a good writer, so I said, let’s find out. The hiring manager gave me an assignment. He gave me a sales brochure and asked me to turn it into a technical brochure, so I did that and got the job, despite my not yet having a degree. It wasn’t until two or three years later that the hiring manager let it slip that the other candidates either refused to complete the assignment or wrote badly.
So, I ended up falling into technical communication. I was very fortunate because it combined two things I liked very much and was good at: technical subjects and communicating.
The Importance of Professional Organizations
Shammy: I understand that you’re a member of the Society for Technical Communication (STC) and the IEEE Professional Communication Society (IEEE-PCS). Which other professional organizations have you belonged to, and which ones have provided the most professional and personal satisfaction, and why?
Stephanie: I have belonged to the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) in the past. I belong to the ACM SIG on Design of Communication (SIGDOC), which is similar to IEEE-PCS. I belong to the ACM SIG on Computer Human Interface (SIGCHI). I am a Charter Member of the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA). I’m also an STC Fellow and an IEEE Life Senior Member.
Which organizations provided the most satisfaction depended on where I was in my career. STC was incredibly supportive to me in my early career, and I couldn’t have done without it. I was very active in the Society, and I learned a huge amount from my colleagues. It is less professionally and personally satisfying to me now because I’m in a niche part of our profession, and STC concentrates more on other aspects of technical communication.
For me now, the user experience groups are more relevant. ACM SIGCHI varies in satisfaction and relevance because, although I’m very much a research-based practitioner (that is, I keep up with the literature and do rigorous work), I’m still not in academia. The ACM special interest groups are more focused toward academics. UXPA was founded in birds-of-a-feather sessions at other conferences. Practitioners were finding that they were not getting as much support and personal and professional satisfaction from SIGCHI and HFES as they had hoped, so they started a professional society for practitioners. Each of these organizations has provided a lot of satisfaction at certain times, and all have been rewarding.
Domain Knowledge and Technical Communicators
Shammy: Do you think that an industry background is important to a technical communicator? For example, how could a technical writer who does not have knowledge about medicine work well on a medical manual?
Stephanie: I think there are two sides to it. One side is what an employee of mine once very well expressed as “my job is to ask the questions of ignorance.” There is some benefit to being an outsider because you are then more likely to look at the subject in the way your audience views it. It’s not necessary to be an expert in the domain. There may even be drawbacks to being an expert because then you make assumptions about what your target audience knows and doesn’t know.
That said, if you know nothing about the subject, you waste people’s time, yours included, trying to get a good manual written. It behooves you to read background information and get as familiar as you can with the domain within whatever amount of time is appropriate for the job you’re doing. If you are in a consultancy like mine, where you’re working on projects for 20 different domains over the course of a year, then you’re satisficing. You’re looking for how quickly you can research a topic without embarrassing yourself in front of a client and without wasting the time of the engineers or physicians or other domain experts that you’re interviewing—but also bearing in mind how you can get the job done in the available schedule and budget.
An Evolving Career
Shammy: How did your role as a technical communicator evolve over your career?
Stephanie: Dramatically, because I started out doing technical communication for one company’s technical products; then I went back to work as a lab technician for a couple of years. I next took a job doing technical communication for a research lab at a university. After that, I realized there was a need for a consulting company that did technical communication because computers were becoming more widely used in the industry. In the early 1960s, you were lucky to be near a computer if you didn’t have a PhD in electrical engineering. By the late 1960s, computers were making their way into business and were becoming productized. A lot of people who didn’t have technical PhDs wanted take advantage of computers, so what was needed were translators—people who could talk to engineers and then create information that ordinary people in business could use.
So I started my consulting firm to provide this worthwhile service. That was a dramatic evolution. I was a one-person company instead of working in a department of a small company or a 3,000-person research lab. At its largest, my consultancy, TecEd, made its way up to 40 employees.
In the 1980s, we began to realize that it wasn’t good enough to write an excellent user guide for a product that was really hard to use. People would not necessarily spend the time to read even good documentation to learn how to use these products. The next step was to evolve the products into being more usable and to apply communication skills such as creating understandable error messages, clear menus, and organized hierarchal structures of menus and commands to make a user interface easier to use. Almost all of the skills needed to improve product usability are related to technical communication, but we also started going to conferences and taking courses to learn more about user experience, human factors, and human-computer interaction. We started hiring more people with backgrounds in psychology. Now about 85% of our practice is user experience related, and the rest is traditional technical communication.
Shammy: Did you ever get involved in the design phase for products to avoid having a good manual for a product that was overly complicated to use?
Stephanie: We do now, but the level of involvement varies because I am running a consultancy. If I were working within a product company, that is exactly what I would be doing. I’d be involved at the early design phase doing the exploratory research that would help to find out the goals and activities of the target users. That information would then be translated into user interface specifications and then be implemented into the final product. Because we are a consultancy, we step in and out of the design process. Sometimes it’s an afterthought, and sometimes the client realizes right from the get-go that they need user experience resources. Sometimes they do all their user experience work internally, but other times they recognize the benefit of adding a neutral third party to conduct design as well as research. You get less end-to-end involvement as a consultancy; you don’t get none, but you get less.
The Evolving Profession
Shammy: What are some major differences you see in the jobs within the technical communication field today versus when you began your career?
Stephanie: When I began my career, technical communicators wrote manuals, and when computers became part of the business world, we wrote help systems. Now, technical communication touches every part of the user experience, and we can be responsible for a lot of it. Good user guides and good help systems are still needed, but working in concert with people to make good interfaces results in making the entire user experience better. Whatever instructional material is supporting the product, that’s part of the user experience just like the product interface. So now in our field, you can specialize in any piece of that.
Shammy: Have you identified any core traits or characteristics that seem to be common among successful technical communicators?
Stephanie: Yes, a prime trait is organizational skill. The ability to take an amorphous mass of information and structure it in a way that makes sense is hugely important and underappreciated. The ability to interview is critically important. Like organizational skills, analytical skills are very important. A successful technical communicator also needs the ability to work at different levels. The ability to pay attention to all the details without losing sight of the broad picture is an important skill as well.
Shammy: Are there any resources that you currently use or have used in recent years that you wish had existed when you started working in technical communication?
Stephanie: When I started working in technical communication, Shammy, I used a typewriter, okay? So what has made the biggest difference is ….
Shammy and Stephanie: A computer!
Stephanie: And that’s despite the fact that I knew how to program computers, but they weren’t word processors. Anything that can be lumped under the old-fashioned label of word processor has made a huge difference because you can create a clean draft every time you change a document. Another resource I wish had existed in the past is online libraries such as ACM Digital Library and IEEE Xplore; the ability to research literature with my own laptop is huge. I don’t have to go to the library anymore, or very rarely. I wish those two things had existed when I started in technical communication, but I would wish they had existed regardless of what profession I was in. Those are not things that have to do specifically with technical communication. Those are things that support all knowledge workers.
Shammy: How has technology influenced the technical communication industry, good and bad?
Stephanie: Earlier I talked about technology resources as being good influences. If I had to think about a bad influence, it’s that too many people, both hiring managers and people in the profession, confuse the tool and the skill. The more technical tools there are, the more that confusion happens. You look at someone’s résumé, and it lists 25 kinds of software that they use, but the résumé is badly written. And this is someone who is applying for a job as a writer! I’m glad people can use all this technology, which will save them time and make them more productive, but if they don’t also have good interviewing skills, good information organizing skills, and good communication skills, it won’t matter how many different apps they use.
Unfortunately, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that you need skills that have nothing to do with which tool you’re using, but rather how good an interviewer you are or how well you organize the information. I can have every outlining tool in the world, but if I don’t see how the parts of this website could more usefully fit together, then it doesn’t matter how good a tree structure tool I’m using. The bad influence of technology is letting the tool trump the task, rather than using tools to be more productive at core skills.
Shammy: Have you ever done any technical communication work internationally? Are there any notable differences compared to the domestic field of technical communication?
Stephanie: Very little. I’ve done user research internationally, but I’m not bilingual. There are differences, because the user experience maturity model is different in different countries. Some countries have people working right at the cutting edge, and some countries are farther back on the maturity scale. But I haven’t worked directly in technical communication internationally. My ability to do that would be limited because it would have to be for an organization which used English as its multinational communication language. I wouldn’t be able to work to an adequate standard in another language.
Looking Back on a Career
Shammy: What do you wish you had known when you were first starting your career as a technical communicator?
Stephanie: I wish I had gotten to know about professional societies in the field sooner, because I worked in the field for probably five years before I learned about STC. I first heard of STC because someone in a different department in the company I was working for had submitted a manual to the STC publications competition.
Shammy: Was your career in technical communication everything you had hoped for? Why?
Stephanie: I’m probably the wrong person to answer that question because I didn’t set out with specific goals. I set out to put myself through school. It’s been exciting and rewarding, and I’ve reinvented my career probably a dozen times in the past 50 years. I’m not sorry technical communication has been my career, but I didn’t have hopes for it, so I don’t really think I can answer that.
Shammy: That is understandable. Most people I’ve spoken to have also accidentally fallen into the field. It makes sense that you didn’t essentially have goals for it at the beginning because you didn’t even know that you might end up in that kind of field.
Stephanie: That’s right; no, I didn’t. Here was this job that was going to let me support myself and help me qualify as an in-state student. Here was another job that would let me pay for my graduate school. I ended up liking the job, so I kept on doing it.
Shammy: What advice do you have for someone who is just starting to explore the field of technical communication and what it has to offer?
Stephanie: Probably to do what you’re doing, which is talking to people in the field. Ask them about the strengths and the drawbacks. There are drawbacks. Although user experience has gotten more traction over the past few years, when you work in an engineering-driven organization, there’s still a slight flavor of second-class citizen about someone who is not designing the guts of the product.
Also, technical communication is really interesting, but it’s not necessarily glamorous. Once I was asked to talk at a communication career fair at a high school. There were two speakers preceding me; one was from a TV station and one was from a radio station. Each of them described how exciting it was to be a commentator and how they had hundreds of applications for every job opening. When it was my turn to speak, I said if instead you’d like the opportunity to choose among a dozen job offers, you might want to explore the field of technical communication. So, there’s another trade-off: do you want make a big difference in a slightly less glamorous field, or do you want to be frustrated job hunting in a glamorous field?
I think technical communication is a really good career, in part because it has so many aspects. You can decide to concentrate on the more technical side, the visual side, the research side—they are all part of our profession. You can be a successful technical communicator and do an awful lot of different things. You can choose one of them or two of them, or you can rotate and evolve through them during your career. There’s a huge opportunity for flexibility and growth.
SHAMMY PRADHAN is a System Safety Engineer with Rockwell Collins Government Systems in Richardson, TX. She is a student in the MS Program in Technical Communication Management at the Mercer University School of Engineering.
