By Matt Sullivan | Senior Member
The Toughest Question I Get: What Do You Do For A Living?
My job is to help organizations create and deliver content, especially when it involves video, interaction, and mobile delivery. I think the best things about my job are the flexibility in my schedule and the variety of things that I get to do. I work online with folks around the globe, either one on one, or in small groups. I also get to assess client workflow and identify potential productivity gains. In some cases I’ve reduced their cost of production by better than 80%. Those are fun clients to work with!
How I Pay the Bills
Here’s a look at the things I’ve been doing this year. I don’t consider it what I’m doing for a living because I’m actively moving away from these revenue streams to produce and deliver training products (managed courseware), not services (hourly/daily training).
- Software trainer
- FrameMaker book author (new version just released at www.techcommtools.com/framemaker-reference-book)
- Tech docs workflow specialist
- Online branding (as a service)
- Tech comm video production and training
- Courseware developer (as a service)
There’s also the admin and down time that goes with being your own boss. The down time this year, however, has been a blessing, allowing me to revise my FrameMaker reference book and develop a series of online courseware offerings.
I mentioned earlier that I’ve been changing paths. While I still do training, production, and consulting, I’ve been moving toward creation of knowledge products rather than hourly or daily training. My goal is to create better, more robust resources and to deliver those resources to a wider audience at a lower overall price point. I’m doing this because I believe tech comm is evolving faster than ever. Years ago I watched someone stand up at a conference to refute the notion that to succeed in tech comm we would all need to interact with engineers and customers; that we’d need to do more than just write text. To me that concept seemed perfectly logical, but I was surprised at the fear I saw at that time. As we all know, it’s no longer just about text, and it’s also not just about working with stakeholders. We’re increasingly becoming chef, cook, and bottlewasher. And we’re expected to be expert at all of them. I firmly believe that we’ll soon be expected to provide interactive and video content in our docs, that those docs will increasingly be accessed on mobile devices, and that we’ll have near primary responsibility for the marketing of that content. In short, we’ll be running our own autonomous agencies within our companies, if not running our own companies outright.
But where will the extra time and effort come from? I submit that we can carve out the time and energy to do these things by stepping away from our need to have 100% perfect documents. Instead, by striving for 90% perfect formatting, we eliminate the sort of custom tweaks in our documents that more often than not take more time than they should, and generally come back to cause extensive rework during revisions. This in turn frees up bandwidth that can be used to address media and marketing concerns.
Where I’m Headed
So the more important question then is “what will you do and what do you want to do for a living?”.
For me, I will be using the experiences I’ve had in tech comm to create knowledge products that produce residual income. This gives me the satisfaction of interacting with students and provides a greater return for my effort by casting a wider net for my audience. The courseware itself isn’t enough, however. It needs to be accompanied by marketing efforts to let folks know that the courses are available.
I taught an STC tech comm video course earlier this year that showed me the increasing demand in the market for online training, and the need for something closer to university-level content. As a result, I took a course (online) to learn how to create more intense online courses. I now have a beta version of my tech comm video course, and two other FrameMaker courses. You can sign up for free versions of those courses at http://training.techcommtools.com.
Something to Think About
Years ago technical communicators were irked when marketing wanted control of our content. We knew it was a bad idea, and time bore that out. But what we didn’t admit was that marketing was right: Our content wasn’t being properly promoted. It’s still not. Carve out time to tell people about your content and what you do. Tell them on Twitter, FaceBook, and YouTube. Tell them in an email blast and blog post. Run webinars to show them how phenomenally good you are at what you do, and how much your content can help them. Be a marketer for yourself!
You create content, and that means that there’s no one more qualified to promote and market that content. And make no mistake about it, in 2015, content marketing is marketing.
Matt Sullivan is the founder of Tech Comm Tools and a member of the Orange County STC Chapter, one of the host chapters for the 2016 Summit. He provides training and workflow solutions for tech comm groups.
