We know that a large part of the reason you decide to attend the Summit is the educational content. Are you wondering what’s in store for 2015?

The full education program can be found on Lanyrd.com, but here is a sampling of some of the sessions you will see at the 2015 Summit: Becoming a New Manager Have you wondered how to transition from a sole contributor to a manager? How can you spot opportunities to advance? How do others perceive or recognize your potential? Or maybe you’re thinking about that ‘leap’ but you’re not sure if leading others is for you. Learn from someone who has been there: Todd will describe his experience of starting as a lone writer to leading a new department. He will outline activities and actions that demonstrated his capability to decision makers as a potential leader. You’ll learn how to identify your own strengths and opportunities for leadership, as well as how to define whether a path for management is right for you. Information Design for Technical Communicators Knowing information design and understanding how to apply it properly to your online and offline documentation is a required skill to be a consummate technical communicator. Learn what information design is, how it affects your audience, and how to speak about it to information architects, graphic artists, and typographers. This presentation helps you see how important it is for every technical communicator to understand basic information design.Your takeaways will be an overview of principles, definitions, leaders in the field, and your own ability to embrace what’s needed to enhance your career. Elements of a Successful Content Strategy Creating a content strategy does not mean simply figuring out how you plan to manage thousands of content-carrying topics or hundreds of chapter-bearing files. That is an element in the strategy equation, but because documentation teams nowadays do so much more than traditional “documentation” and work with so many departments outside of their own, a successful content strategy involves orchestrating a number of related elements. In this presentation, we’ll look at:
  • Maximizing the discovery process
  • Engaging internal stakeholders, while preventing them from hijacking your content
  • Efficiently providing all required deliverables
  • Implementing a governance process
A Painless Introduction to Information Typing Information Typing is a powerful and important content structuring technique for user assistance authors, but one that is commonly misunderstood and certainly under-applied. Well-typed content benefits both readers and writers, and produces help topics that are easier to understand and use, focused within the domain, and reusable across output formats. In this tool-agnostic, non-DITA (really!) session, we’ll look at the primary information types, examine some simple tests for determining what content goes where, and discover ways to reduce or eliminate redundant and unnecessary content.
You will learn:
  • What information typing is and why it’s important
  • How to recognize the primary content types
  • What kinds of content to include and omit
  • How to restructure poorly structured content