By Uday Chava
"Jobs you may be interested in"—that was the subject of an email from LinkedIn screaming for attention in my mailbox. What a transformation this has been—a job waiting in your mailbox when you want one! Recruiters, newspaper campaigns, recruitment drives at conferences, walk-in job interviews, and hiring from schools won’t go away any time soon. But with increased technology jobs have transformed, too. This article discusses these changes and their impacts on the technical writers’ job market in India.
While the emergence of social media is changing the way we will find our next job (when and if you intend to, that is), this is just another avenue to an opportunity—it’s a more direct one, but won’t quite replace human resource departments.
Besides the extensive consumption of social media, other trends, such as a maturing job market and embracing the mantra of collaboration, have found their way into the Indian market. Another interesting aspect is the readiness with which writers from India are exploring jobs in markets as diverse as Singapore, China, Thailand, Dubai, and Turkey.
Socially visible—the new normal
Life has changed with the proliferation of social media. Writers, like all other professionals, have their profiles on the Web, some choosing to publically advertise their skills rather than locking them away in the database of a job site.
A MaFoi Randstad WorkMonitor study reveals that 90% of Indian employees have individual accounts on social media sites, out of which close to 80% use them for professional purposes. While these purposes vary from gathering information about a trend in their profession to tracking events of a company, the focus largely remains on job opportunities.
There was a time when contacting recruiters was difficult and proactively reaching out to hiring managers was nearly impossible. However, in addition to helping create a culture of openness, social media is helping candidates know early on who is soliciting applications for a job. Candidates typically receive calls and job propositions from recruiters, but when asked for more information about the job and the client, the stock response from the recruiter is that they would get back to the candidate.
Portals like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are among the first places that managers use to search for their hires, at least for an early evaluation of a candidate’s experience. Part of the evaluation is to identify a common connection that can be used as a reference. LinkedIn today has over 14 million users in India—more than China and only slightly behind the United States.
Hiring managers are using the Internet to get a well-rounded view of prospective job candidates—their skills, accomplishments, and overall fit within their company. "In my current role as a manager I have successfully hired a team of 12 using my LinkedIn network at nearly zero cost. I could identify candidates and validate their profiles either with the help of a shared contact or a contact who worked in the same company well before inviting the candidate for an interview," explained a documentation manager at an engineering company during a discussion on the topic.
A profession coming into its own
The IT industry in India employs over 90% of technical writers in India, and it is approximately a USD $400-million industry. But this percentage is on the wane with more engineering, pharmaceutical, and retail businesses hiring writers. Within the IT job market for writers, employers can be classified in ways that show how the job markets have evolved:
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Research and development consists of product development and support environments. Writer positions in these companies have a well-formed product strategy, and in most cases the advantage of an established team elsewhere in the world that provides the support needed to hire and develop highly skilled teams.
Typically these companies invest heavily in hiring the best resources available in the market and help groom expert generalists who then begin to take on roles that are allied to writing. From over 60% in 2005, the contribution of jobs from this group of companies is now between 30–35%.
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Services include companies of all sizes that outsource work either onshore or offshore. Over the years, technical documentation services have grown to become a fair-sized portfolio, and generally rake in margins on par with software development.
By their very nature, services require writers with generalist skills so they can cater to diverse business requirements. This group of companies generated close to 50% of jobs in the 2007–08, but now contribute around 40%.
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Independent documentation services companies are a relatively young phenomenon in comparison. Often starting off as training entities, they have now created a niche for themselves and also provide a good entry point to young people who aspire to become writers.
This third group is a trend worth watching closely as they transform the job market landscape. From contributing less than 5% of the jobs in 2002, it has now risen to close to 30% today.
As the profession matured, more and more experienced managers have started companies that provide writing services. Today, writing services companies based elsewhere are setting up operations in India, moving here to support their multinational clients. A slew of companies that specialise in areas such as engineering, oil and gas, aviation, and automotives have established a presence in India to support their existing global clients, as well as the burgeoning domestic automotive industry.
This is impressive considering that there are virtually no academic institutions that have established departments of standard master’s programs to train students in to this profession.
A market transformed
I vividly remember how I landed my first job as a technical writer in 1998. I was assigned the task of interviewing the CEO of recruiting firm for the business supplement of the newspaper where I then worked. I soon realized why I was given the task. He was not the typical business executive who would talk about numbers and percentages in his business, which meant I needed to research more about the recruiting business.
About 20 minutes into the appointment, it dawned on me that it was I who was being interviewed. A month later, I began working as the sole writer/editor for a webzine that focused on jobs and careers in the high technology industry. He believed an early Web presence would help complement his already thriving recruiting business. Websites like Monster.com and a slew of others were still a few years away from the Indian shores.
Over the past 14 years as a writer and manager, I have interacted with a number of recruiters who used various means to locate good candidates and get them to connect with hiring managers, including introducing fresh graduates to the profession.
During the late 1990s, recruiters even had to reach out to English departments at universities, where the faculties were yet to be exposed to the discipline of technical communication. A senior manager who was hiring writers as early as 2001 said, "Compromises were made when we could not find talented writers, and then we had to train them." Less than half a dozen universities in India offer technical communication as part of their academics, none of them offer a master’s program.
Since the early 2000s, technical writers have had the advantage of interacting within the community through opportunities provided by the STC India Chapter, as well as through Technical Writers of India (TWIN), an online forum for technical writers. The annual events by the India chapter offer documentation managers opportunities to identify possible hires and also interact with them in an informal environment.
All of this is undergoing change, however. "There is a significant difference in the way we hire writers today," Pawan Nayar, group manager, content and community at Adobe India told me while sharing his experiences when hiring at Adobe. "A few years ago knowledge of writing and of authoring tools would have landed the job. Now, we look beyond these traits—ability to multitask, understanding the social world, balancing relationships between users and internal stakeholders, and a continual learning ability are critical," he adds.
Talent communities and stalking companies
In this rapidly changing market, those who establish their presence and contacts strategically tend to be located and hired faster. Similarly, companies have begun to watch communities and groups where candidates participate with their opinion.
Perhaps the biggest change for technical writers in the past few years is the requirement to contribute to a part of rather than the whole artifact (I dare not call it a document anymore). Collaboration is difficult face-to-face, but online can be even more difficult. Teams have to deal with language and cultural barriers, time zone issues, and overall communication issues. For technical writers, the individual focus is hard to avoid since the practice of writing is normally a solitary activity. But when writing practices are automated, writers must transcend the inclination to work alone and own whole documents. Teams of writers must work together in a content management system (CMS).
The change toward a CMS-centric environment means bringing together groups that are allied to documentation, such as instructional designers, Web content developers, technical support teams, collateral development teams, etc.
Experts or generalists?
Technical communication, like many other professions, is inherently multidisciplinary, sometimes bordering on esoteric from the writers’ point of view. This brings up the debate whether writers must stay generalists or become experts in a domain.
The need for innovation in companies developing products that have a high-evolution curve means the core team is in product-design innovation workshops for extended periods. As Sandhya Prasad, director of professional communication at SapientNitro, an IT consulting services company, says, "In professional communication environments like ours, I need to be able to deploy resources to perform content-related tasks ranging from creating a communications campaign to writing methodology handbooks and developing templates." In such environments, expert generalists and interdisciplinary team players will thrive.
Home, hive, or across the shores?
"When I am fully in sync with what other team members are doing, the fact that I am physically not amongst them is not a big deterrent. They know work gets done," says Suchitra, who resides in Bangalore and works for her Australian employer. There has been increasing acceptance of this mode of employment. There are challenges around handling financial transactions as part of payroll that need to ironed out, but this is a rising trend. Employers are going the extra mile to hire and retain experienced staff.
"I have been working remotely for over two years now. Our projects use the Agile methodology, and I usually get Skyped into our stand-up meetings at about 5:30 AM, which is also the time I start work. At that point, I have just woken up and am still in my pajamas, but no one usually notices! My team sends me pictures of the wall every other day so I can keep track of stories and cards," she adds.
There is an increasing trend to encourage employees to work remotely—from their homes in a different city or even a different country.
Signs of confidence
While there is no doubt about the upbeat mood in the market, the growing confidence amongst the writer workforce to scale up to the market’s expectation is on an even keel. This, along with a healthy growth in salaries over the past decade has augured well for the writers’ job market. Additionally the dynamics in the content business are helping writers find new opportunities for growth, and an overall positive outlook on what the future could offer to writers in India.
Uday Chava was most recently a senior manager for documentation systems at Vestas, a world leader in wind energy. At Vestas, he helped develop a DITA-based content strategy and built the framework to develop, translate and distribute from a unified infrastructure. Since 1998, he has worked for Nokia, Microsoft, Manugistics and IBM, besides consulting for over two dozen companies. He has a wide range of expertise in writing, authoring tools, training, and in building high performance information development teams. Uday is an avid trekker and considers himself lucky to have spent time in the Himalayas.
