Welcome to Roundtable

What can you do with your existing skills to move your career forward? What are your your options either within the field or transitioning into another one using the skills you have in your portfolio? How do you leverage the skills you have? What new skills do you need to acquire to fill the gaps?

And where is the field of technical communication going in the new age of AI? What will content development be like in 10-20 years? What will change? What do you need to learn and do to stay relevant?

Explore this Roundtable content on Career Transitions in Technical Communication.

Telecommuting, remote work, work at home – these may have slightly different connotations but they all refer to ways of doing traditional work outside of a traditional office setting. How do we survive, and thrive in this environment?

This curated series focused on what that looks like, reviewing ways to set up a space, establish a schedule, connect with your coworkers, and get your work done in what is often a chaotic environment. We'll talk about the technologies that enable people to work remotely, and the interpersonal and communication skills that are required for people to do it well.

This Roundtable topic illuminated the process of publishing in research journals in the field of technical communication.  We started with the basics of research and proceeded to strategies for choosing the right journal for your research project, adapting your manuscript for that journal, submitting your manuscript, corresponding with the editor, responding to the comments of reviewers, and revising your manuscript.

This curated series focused on the relationship between content and design.

We explored the many meanings of the word “design”, and differentiated between “little d” and “big D”.  Big D = design as the overall process of creating the product that works for the organization and the audience. Little d = the principles and guidelines for each aspect of design (for example, the Gestalt principles for information design; the cognitive psychology guidelines for interaction design).

This curated series focused on Modern Technical Communication Workflows. We explored how organizations take different approaches not only to content authoring, but also to initiating documentation projects; working with SMEs; defining the revision/approval process; managing document revisions; publishing; tracking documentation issues; and translating technical content. Curated by Alan Houser.

This curated series focuses on the Future of Content. Where content will go will, of course, be defined by where customers want it to go facilitated by the rise of new available technologies like artificial intelligence, mixed reality, natural language process all along the content lifecycle, and real-time experience analytics across all our channels. Curated by Noz Urbina.

This curated series focuses on the informational response to Industry 4.0: Information 4.0, how it needs to be integrated into products and services that affect our daily lives, and what technical communicators need to think about going forward in order to do their jobs in an ethical, humanist way, and maintain their careers.

Technical communications experts have a major headstart in the race to build the future. Personalization depends on structured content meeting real-time customer context. Delivering integrated experiences across various native content sets is directly derived from the practice of Content Engineering. Utilizing standard content and semantic structures allows content portability. Learn more about the practice of content engineering from one of the leaders of this emerging field. Content Engineering curated by Cruce Saunders.

Join us as we explore the emerging field of Learning Experience Design (LX) – a holistic approach to designing, developing, and delivering learner-focused solutions. LX design weaves together methods and approaches from instructional design, user experience design, visual design, service design, and Design Thinking.

Learning Experience Design (curated by Phylise Banner)

Translation is not a commodity. In a global economy, the world becomes more integrated, but technology cannot successfully produce all of the communication humans need and want. Translators are a junction point. This month we will discuss from the basic – defining globalization vs. internationalization vs. localization – and the small – how to write for translation and localization – to the large – what machines are already doing for us and where we see the industry in 20 years.

Round the World in Four Weeks: Translation, Localization and Globalization (curated by Phylise Banner)

This curated series will help you start and use such a system to measure your content’s impact to inform content decisions and to show its value.

Content Measurement + Intelligence (curated by Colleen Jones)

We’ll look at different modes of working together from both an organizational and an individual perspective.

Leadership and Teams (curated by Toni Mantych)

Are YOU ready to design machine-readable content that can be delivered in the context of your users?

Content Design and Development for Machine Delivery
(curated by Toni Byrd Ressaire)

Explore the benefits of professional development and specific methods for creating and executing a powerful career strategy.

Professional Development
(curated by Alyssa Fox & Alisa Bonsignore)

We look at what content strategy actually is, how content strategy applies in a range of content environments, why to consider incorporating content strategy into your technical communication work processes, and where you can use content strategy to bridge silos.

Content Strategy and Experience
(curated by Rahel Bailie)

Our future, the future of technical communication, is being written all around us, in a language we can understand: Our own.

The Future of Technical Communication
(curated by Scott Abel)