Changing Careers

Changing Careers in Technical Communication: Do you have what it takes? Progression session handout Julie Bommarito, Session Moderator, Wisconsin chapter Overview Technical communication as a profession offers its members the unique ability and advantage of taking core skills, mixing in some additional skills, and changing to another career. Many technical communicators are very good at what they do, but are unsure how their skills may apply to a different career within the profession. This session will give you information about what skills are needed to move to a new career within the technical communication profession. Core skills Over the years, much discussion has taken place in the technical communication community about core skills for technical communicators. Everyone seems to agree that a core skill set that spans the various careers within technical communication exists. However, there is some disagreement about what constitutes that core skill set. The existence of a core skill set in this profession is extremely important to the ability of technical communicators to move between careers successfully. Although individual careers each have specific skills that you need to perform them successfully, they all also share some or all of the core skills inherent in technical communication. Some of the core skills of technical communicators include the following:     Written communication – the ability to clearly communicate complicated subject matter to a variety of audiences Verbal communication – the ability to verbally receive and deliver information (such as performing SME interviews or discussing issues with a client) Audience analysis – the ability to learn about an audience to understand their needs and deliver the information in the most appropriate way Adaptability to technology – the ability to quickly learn new technologies, both those that are being documented and those needed to perform the job The speakers in this progression discuss what skills should be added to these core skills to move successfully to a new career in technical communication. These discussions are summarized here. Topics  Usability, Karen Bachmann  Information Design, Phylise Banner  Web Communication , Michele Berkes  Training, Mark Hanigan  Writing Technical Books, John Hedtke  Indexing, Lori Lathrop  Management, Mary Wise Usability by Karen Bachmann, Suncoast chapter What core skills of technical communicators are needed most for this career? As the name suggests, usability is about the user. Building on the basic audience analysis that we learn as communicators, understanding the user requires investigating the users’ educational and career background, task competency, computer competency, environment in which the end product will be used, the tasks that the end product must support, and attitude of the user toward the product. Organization skills (including information design); understanding of design and layout; clear, concise communication of core ideas; and sympathy with users are also valuable when entering a usability role. What other skills are important to be successful in this career? Additional skills and knowledge required depend somewhat on the types of usability tasks you want to do. The skills and knowledge needed to design software user interfaces differ from those needed to design hardware interfaces and differ even further from those needed to conduct usability testing. Some of the usability resources listed at the end of this handout provide detailed guidance for specific areas of expertise. The following list summarizes some broad categories.  Understand the basics of the production tools and process for the end product. For example, to design software user interfaces, learn the fundamental elements that are available in the programming language used and the conventions or style guides appropriate to the platform.  Learn the best practices for designing in a new medium, whether you are designing a user interface or a new mousetrap.  Understand how to evaluate (test) product usability and how to interpret and present the results of your research.  Understand how usability fits in with the development life cycle and what the different tasks and goals are. Why did you choose this career? While working on custom software projects, I grew tired of creating documentation that I knew was not useful to the end users in that it did not address actual problems or needs. Documentation was too often considered the last resort bug fix for a badly designed application. Moving “upstream” in the development life cycle was the right way for me to apply my skills and knowledge and to contribute to, and even ensure, a more usable, useful, and satisfying product for the end users. What would you tell someone who wants to know if this career is right for them? Do your homework. While many of the technical communication skills translate, you must understand how those skills are applied to new tasks and the unique goals for creating a usable product. (This advice, of course, is not limited to just moving into usability, but applies to any career change no matter how similar the new role seems to your current one.) Additionally, usability has a strong academic and research background that needs to be understood even by self-taught, “guerilla” usability specialists. What resources (books, Web sites, other professional organizations) do you recommend for someone interested in learning more about this career? 1. Marlana Coe’s Human Factors for Technical Communicators (Wiley: New York, NY, 1996.) provides an excellent introduction of human factors. 2. STC Usability SIG (http://www.stcsig.org/usability/index.html) The usability bookshelf in the Resources area provides an expansive list of usability and human factors books and a “Top Ten” list from which to start. 3. Usability Professionals’ Association (http://upassoc.org/) 4. ACM SIGCHI (Computer-Human Interaction; http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigchi/) 5. The websites of companies specializing usability and human factors consulting often contain great introduction material, free email newsletters, and links to excellent resources. Karen Bachmann Karen Bachmann has over nine years of experience developing all aspects of the user experience including developing user requirements, designing user interfaces, conducting usability testing, and creating user-oriented technical documentation. Karen has a Bachelors degree in Technical Writing from the University of South Florida. Information Design: What’s in My Garage? by Phylise Banner, Metro New York What core skills of technical communicators are needed most for this career?  Graphic Design  Problem Solving  Project Management  Visual Communication  Verbal Communication  Imagination What other skills are important to be successful in this career?  Resource Allocation  Research Methods  Analysis Methods  Inventiveness  Creativity  Language Interpretation  Sensitivity Why did you choose this career? The career chose me. Information Design is the combination of several fields of interest. I just happened to have had training in graphic design, information analysis and technical drawing. My other interests include human factors and perception. What would you tell someone who wants to know if this career is right for them? This career is right for anyone interested in finding simple solutions to complex problems. Many of us are information designers at home and don’t even realize it. Anyone who can communicate clearly can be successful as an information designer. What resources (books, Web sites, other professional organizations) do you recommend for someone interested in learning more about this career? The ID SIG has an excellent resource page with everything you’ll ever want to learn about information design: http://www.stcsig.org/id/resources.html And, my new favorite book is Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug and Roger Black, ISBN: 0789723107; 1st edition (October 13, 2000). Phylise Banner Phylise Banner is an information designer currently working in instructional technology for the University Without Walls at Skidmore College. She holds an undergraduate degree in Graphic Design from FIT and Information Analysis from NYU and is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Instructional Technology and Distance Education from Nova Southeastern University. A senior member of STC, Phylise has regularly presented sessions on information design, creativity and visual thinking to STC members at chapter, regional and national venues. Web Communication by Michele Berkes, Wisconsin chapter What core skills of technical communicators are needed most for this career? I see web communication as a combination of many of the other topics being discussed by my colleagues: information design, usability, etc. It is essential to understand your audience, organize and make sense of information, create a coherent navigation structure, and present the info on the screen so that the hierarchy and relationships are clear. In addition, I have found that content development for web projects is often done outside the established print communication processes, so it is even more critical for the communicator to have solid project management skills such as scoping a project, gathering requirements, managing expectations, and so on. What other skills are important to be successful in this career? I have found it very helpful to have a complete and thorough knowledge of HTML and cascading style sheets as well as more general skills with Javascript and a solid conceptual understanding of the back-end technologies. In my experience, there is still a lot of room for variation in how much technical knowledge one needs and in what areas. I have colleagues who have specialized in server technologies, content management, modular development and reuse of content, user interface design, and so forth, and others who are more focused on the communication aspects of the job, such as information architecture and best practices for writing for the web. In addition, I follow a formal user-centered design process, which includes paper prototyping, scenario development, usability evaluation, and so forth. Why did you choose this career? My involvement with the web began in 1994, when a small group at the U.S. Department of Energy location where I was working decided to create a web site for DOE. As the most technical of the people in our print publications group, I was drafted as the communications person on the team. In the intervening years many aspects of my career have changed, but the core commitment to understanding and meeting the needs of our users remains. It is so important to have an advocate on the team to emphasize that the technology is a tool to serve a larger purpose, and to keep steering the focus back to the communication goals and the user’s needs. Just because you can doesn’t mean that you should. What would you tell someone who wants to know if this career is right for them? Web communication is a broad topic that encompasses many different paths. For many of us, this is one aspect of our jobs, rather than a career in itself. If you want to broaden your experience into communication on the web, work first to gain knowledge of communication principles as they apply to the web (writing for the web, navigation models, etc.). Then you can add the technical knowledge. What resources (books, Web sites, other professional organizations) do you recommend for someone interested in learning more about this career?  STC Information Design SIG (www.stcsig.org/id)  STC Usability SIG (www.stcsig.org/usability/)  Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug, Que (2000)  A List Apart (www.alistapart.com)  Jakob Nielsen’s site (www.useit.com)  User Interface Engineering (www.uie.com) Technical  Webmonkey (www.webmonkey.com)  HTML Writers Guild (www.hwg.org)  World Wide Web Consortium (www.w3.org) Michele Berkes Michele Berkes has worked in communications for more than 15 years. In that time, she has been involved with content creation, information architecture, navigation and interaction design, and user interface design for intranets, extranets, and public web sites. Currently, Michele is a User-Centered Design Consultant with Northwestern Mutual in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She was the user-centered design team lead for a recent redesign of Northwestern Mutual's intranet, Mutualnet, which was named as one of the 10 best intranets of 2002 by the Nielsen Norman Group. Michele also serves on the STC Board of Directors as director-sponsor for region 6. Training Hey, why not teach it? After all, you wrote the book on it! by Mark E. Hanigan, Suncoast chapter To me, training is a natural addition to the growing list of project responsibilities that a skilled technical communicator can provide. Whether it be train-the-trainer or train the end user, no one is in a better position than a technical communicator to provide instructor-led or remote training. First of all, training and technical communication are on a “harmonic convergence.” More and more companies are merging training and technical communication into the same department. They usually have names like IT Support, Product Services, or even the blander, yet more accurate “Training and Technical Communication.” Second, with the Web having become a mainstream tool in the corporate environment, it has become a primary tool for use in training delivery. Further, multimedia and tools like Lotus ScreenCam and Microsoft NetMeeting (and the myriad of offerings of the same ilk) have provided technical trainers with ways of disseminating information to students that are limited only by your imagination (well, perhaps the budget as well). Actually, speaking of budget, corporations look for the best way to get the most information to the most users at the lowest cost. From this need was born the concept of “blended learning solutions.” What this means is that you determine, based on audience cross-section, audience geography, and available development and delivery tools, the best combination of training that both meets the customer needs and corporate dollars. This leads to the next important facet of training; the development of training materials themselves. A key buzzword of this decade is “enterprise content management.” In its most simplistic form, this term means getting the most output bang for a given chunk of written word. Thus, a given description might end up in marketing literature, the array of user and system documentation, online Help, Help desk support files, and training materials! Because blended learning means some combination of instructor-led, learning lab, computer-based learning, and distance learning, the addition of training in your toolbox offers something for technical communicators of almost every ilk. Don’t think of training as simply standing in front of a classroom. Although this remains and will always be an important part, it no longer represents the “lion’s share” definition of training. What core skills of technical communicators are needed most for this career?  Traditional technical communication skills (writing, editing, and so forth)  Subject knowledge (you get this naturally when you develop your deliverables)  Computer application skills (depends on the deliverables – Macromedia Suite, click-2-learn, HTML, XML, and so forth)  Interpersonal skills and group leadership skills (we need these to deal with developers anyway, right?)  Computer troubleshooting skills (things always go wrong at the wrong time – but you know that!)  Photography, artistic, and other multimedia skills What other skills are important to be successful in this career?  Interviewing skills  Negotiation skills  Ice water in your veins  A good sense of humor! (Sorry, Mary – I stole these from you – they are perfect!) Why did you choose this career?  I love the mix – spend some quality “CPU” time researching and developing my materials, then spend some quality I/O time disseminating the information!  There is a tremendous amount of job satisfaction to actually see my “deliverables in action” What would you tell someone who wants to know if this career is right for them?  Do you like diversity in the types of work that you do?  Do you want “hands on” opportunities to merge the products, the deliverables, and your end users?  Do you want a technical communication career that, because of its diversity, lends itself nicely to long-term consulting opportunities?  Do you also like the opportunity to springboard into related opportunities, such as human process re-engineering and project management? What resources (books, Web sites, other professional organizations) do you recommend for someone interested in learning more about this career?  I hate to promote it, but American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) offers a wealth on information on training and instructional design.  Leading e-Learning and Using e-Learning, both by William K Horton  Designing Web-Based Training : How to Teach Anyone Anything Anywhere Anytime  Flash 5 – Visual JumpStart, by Patricia Hartman, a good book on XML, HTML, JAVA, click-to-learn, or any of the other tools you might consider using for CBT or WBT development.  Intercom – numerous related articles  e-learning magazine (free subscription to qualified subscribers)  Online Learning magazine (free subscription to qualified subscribers) also includes weekly ezine  Inside Technology Training magazine (free subscription to qualified subscribers)  Technical Training magazine (free subscription to qualified subscribers)  Eliot Masie’s ezine  Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy by Ann Rockley  Any of several books out on instructor-led training and on ice breakers Mark E. Hanigan Mark E. Hanigan is a technical communication, instructional design and instructor consultant for his own company, On the Write Track. Recent clients include Walt Disney World, MedcoHealth Solutions, Franklin Templeton Investments and GTE (now Verizon). He has taught technical courses for students on four continents, using both instructor led and distance learning techniques. He has over 20 years experience in technical communication and training, including over eight as a consultant. Mark is a senior member of both STC and ASTD. For STC, Mark has served in a variety of roles at the chapter and Society level, including STC president in 2000-2001. He was recently elected Associate Fellow of STC. Mark makes his home in Palm Harbor, Florida. Writing Technical Books by John Hedtke, Hoosier Chapter What core skills of technical communicators are needed most for this career? The ability to write quickly in a reasonably coherent fashion. The ability to create structure for a document out of thin air: books frequently are totally free-form and are presented in the order the writer thinks they should go and not what some company style guide suggests. What other skills are important to be successful in this career? Fast typing. The ability to tolerate hours of loneliness while writing. Why did you choose this career? I like working at home and not having to commute. What would you tell someone who wants to know if this career is right for them? “How much money do you need to make?” Right now, if you need to make a lot of money, writing books is probably not the best place to be although this will improve in the next couple years. “How much breadth do you want to add to your resume?” Writing books will make your resume much stronger and may be a good bid for enhancing one’s professional standing, regardless of the likelihood of not making a lot of money for writing the actual book. What resources (books, Web sites, other professional organizations) do you recommend for someone interested in learning more about this career? Check out http://www.studiob.com, the Studio B web site. Be sure to sign up for the Studio B listserv for computer book authors (then be sure to switch your options to get the digest version). There are a lot of links at http://www.hedtke.com/writlink.htm. You can also just go to http://www.hedtke.com and then go to the Links section and look for “Publishing Stuff.” John Hedtke John Hedtke is the award-winning author of 23 books. He has over 20 years in the software business, 19 years writing, and 7 years in technical publications management. His most recent books are RoboHelp for the Web (with Brenda Huettner) and Washington Trivia, (2nd Edition). A complete list of books and other writing projects can be found at his web site, www.hedtke.com. John is an Associate Fellow and lives in Fort Wayne, IN. Indexing by Lori Lathrop, Metrolina Chapter What core skills of technical communications are needed most for this career?  Analytical skills  Audience analysis skills  Experience with indexing software  Indexing skills (see list of resources)  Knowledge of indexing formats and style guidelines  Knowledge of publishing cycles What other skills are important to be successful in this career?  A “crystal ball” in your head  Entrepreneurial skills  Marketing skills  Self-discipline Why did you choose this career? When I was a technical writer for IBM, I became the lead instructor for IBM’s indexing workshops. Although I was knowledgeable about IBM’s indexing guidelines, I knew very little about the indexing guidelines of other corporations or publishing houses. Eventually, I joined ASI (American Society of Indexers), learned how to use stand-alone indexing software, and started moonlighting as a freelance indexer. In 1992, I decided to take the IBM buy-out and, since then, I’ve been happy to say that indexing is my life! What would you tell someone who wants to know if this career is right for them? Don’t quit your day job until you have several clients. Learn all you can about indexing and create a few indexes that you can send to publishers who ask for samples of your work. If you have trouble doing that, then indexing as a career is probably not right for you. However, if you enjoy all that, then join the STC Indexing SIG and the American Society of Indexers to learn more. What resources (books, Web sites, other professional organizations) do you recommend for someone interested in learning more about this career? Books:  Handbook of Indexing Techniques: A Guide for Beginning Indexers by Linda K. Fetters (ISBN 0-929-59904-7)  Indexing: The Manual of Good Practice by Pat F. Booth (ISBN 3-598-11536-9)  Indexing Books by Nancy Mulvany (ISBN 0-226-55014-1)  Chapter 9 of Read Me First! A Style Guide for the Computer Industry by Sun Technical Publications (ISBN 0-134-55347-0)  Chapter 9 of Science & Technical Writing: A Manual of Style, 2nd Edition, edited by Philip Rubens (ISBN 0-415-92551-7) Discussion Groups:  ASI-L (for ASI members) – http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ASI-L/  INDEX-L – http://listserv.unc.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=Index-L Web sites:  American Society of Indexers - http://www.asindexing.org  Indexing FAQ – a two-part article for TECHWR-L http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl.indexingfaqpart1.html  Lathrop Media Services – http://www.indexingskills.com  STC Indexing SIG – http://www.stcsig.org/idx Lori Lathrop Lori Lathrop (LoriLathrop@earthlink.net) is a Senior Member of STC, founder of the STC Indexing SIG, and a Past President of the American Society of Indexers (ASI).. She provides indexing services for publishing houses, professional organizations, authors, and corporate clients throughout North America, and she delivers her Indexing Skills Workshop for Technical Communicators for corporate clients and writers organizations. Management You, too, can be a PHB! by Mary R. Wise, Washington, D.C. chapter What core skills of technical communicators are needed most for this career?  People skills, first and foremost  Resource analysis and load balancing skills  Strategic planning skills  Number skills  Conflict resolution skills  A thick skin! What other skills are important to be successful in this career?  Interviewing skills  Negotiation skills  Ice water in your veins  A good sense of humor! Why did you choose this career?  To develop my leadership skills in real life  To move my department ahead in terms of tools, skills, and vision What would you tell someone who wants to know if this career is right for them? You will be the Boss. This means:  You must be ready to separate your friendships from your job.  You are a voice for the company.  You will have to manage up as well as down. What resources (books, Web sites, other professional organizations) do you recommend for someone interested in learning more about this career?  The Fifth Discipline, by Peter Senge  The Leadership Challenge, by Kouzes and Posner  Managing from the Heart, by Hyler Bracey, Jack Rosenblum, Aubrey Sanford, Roy Trueblood  Dogbert’s Top Secret Management Handbook, by Scott Adams Mary R. Wise Mary R. Wise is a Senior Communications Manager at Fannie Mae. She manages the curriculum for the Housing Finance Institute, a seminar series that teaches mortgage professionals how to work effectively with Fannie Mae. Before moving to her current position, Mary was Senior Manager of Technical Communication at Manugistics, Inc., where she directed the development of documentation for the company’s supply chain management software products. She has over 20 years experience in technical communication, including stints as word processor, technical writer, instructional designer, and staff manager. Although she has a B.A. from the University of Maryland, Mary feels her background as a circus clown prepared her well for both her corporate and STC jobs.