Bridging the Chasm: Achieving Prosperity as a Content Professional
I’ve been advocating that content professionals—including everyone from content strategists to writers to other technical communicators like visual artists (who are absolutely communicating technical information, just not with words)—need to do a better job of promoting their good works and demanding excellent compensation for the value they bring to their organizations.
But my above statement conveys part of the problem: we’re making progress, but it’s taking years and (in my oh-so-quiet and patient opinion) not moving fast enough.
Have you heard the expression, “The cobbler’s son has no shoes”? It means that the village cobbler is so busy making shoes for others that he doesn’t have time to make them for his own family. Could it be that we’re so busy promoting the good works of others that we’re not promoting our own, even though we know we should be?
Gap Analysis
The term gap analysis means looking at where you are (or your production is) versus where you want to be. Once you have identified the gaps between where you are and where you want to be, you can create a plan for bridging the chasm.
In preparing this issue, I looked at where I thought technical communicators are versus where we should be, then set as a goal to present not just some “pie in the sky” theoretical idea of what we should be doing but to find people in our industry who are currently doing it with the tools and talents that we already have in our core competencies.
My gap analysis identified the following areas for improvement. From my experience as owner of a technical writing and staffing firm, I find that most technical communicators:
- Tend to wait for someone to praise or reward them (“my work should speak for itself”), not demand attention, ask for a raise, etc.
- Agree to do everything asked of them but then complain that they aren’t appreciated.
- Think they don’t have power to affect change (otherwise they would promote their good works and demand a raise!).
- Do not articulate the value they bring to organizations, even when asked.
- Fail to predict trends in the industry and proactively take advantage of those trends.
To help propel readers into becoming powerful organizational change agents, I recruited the following industry leaders to share their hard-won lessons learned.
Chellie Campbell, author of The Wealthy Spirit and Zero to Zillionaire, writes about how you can achieve prosperity as a content professional. Clay Delk, a content strategist at Facebook, explains how to embrace your power and affect organizational change. Keith Boyd, the principal director of content services at Microsoft, shows how his team transformed developer documentation at Microsoft by first learning how to say “no.”
Debra Johnson, the president of the Orlando–Central Florida STC Chapter and the technical communication lead at Wyndham Vacation Ownership, writes about the art of the elevator speech. Pam Noreault, a senior user experience content specialist at ACI Worldwide, writes about riding the wave of the convergence of user experience and technical communication.
Over my career I’ve made many mistakes (some larger than others), but that’s how you learn. Keep what works, change or discard what doesn’t, and practice, practice, practice until you are an expert in your field—and then make darn sure you promote your good works.
Even if you have a publicist or (more likely these days) a social media marketer, you are still the source of your professional amazingness.
Do your own personal gap analysis. Record where you are now, set goals for where you want to be this time next year, then create and execute a strategy to get there.
And take notes along the way. I want to see your article in next year’s issue!
— Jack Molisani
