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> My question is how do we find ways to educate hiring managers about our
> real value to the company?
Demonstrate your capability and sell yourself properly. Sometimes little
things like focusing on your technical skills over your writing skills
will demonstrate that you are more valuable.
> In addition, if hiring managers do not perceive our value as technical
> writers, how can we ever convince them of our value when we go beyond
the
> traditional responsibilities of technical writing?
Some managers won't value any skills other than what they already possess.
These are bad managers, but there are a lot of bad managers out there.
They think a skilled writer has exactly the same skills they have. Since
many managers haven't written a single document since the late 1980's,
they think the skills they had then are all that's required to be
successful. They're wrong.
A good manager would accept his/her shortcomings and build a team that
compensated for that. He/she would purposefully seek out people with
strong skills in different areas. But, this would require the manager to
possess a more sophisticated set of emotions which could tactfully handle
the reality that they don't know everything. Unfortunately, we live in a
world where the majority of the population has the emotional maturity of a
9 year old boy.
Then there are obsessive managers who get wrapped up in some methodology,
like information mapping. They become so engrossed in the theories that
they fail to see value in anything outside their well-ordered methods.
These people will fight to the death to explain why their methods (and
knowledge) is the end-all-be-all of technical communications and all other
knowledge is worthless, useless, and destructive.
So you can see - that the problem is not always educating the managers.
Many of them will defend their right to remain an ignorant dolt. Why
should they change? They have positions of authority and by-golly they
will do anything to defend that authority.
Bad managers will immediately dismiss any new knowledge or technical
skills as irrelevant because it has the potential to make them look bad.
Rather than be good at managing people and learning new technologies,
these jerks opt instead to belittle people and dismiss them so they will
become disenchant ed and take lower paying jobs.
I once had a tech pubs manager straight faced tell me that no writer
should ever use Windows NT and he would not consider anybody who used NT
as a "serious writer" (this was back in 1996). He wanted "real writers"
who apparently used the outdated technologies he loved. Basically, I had
knowledge he didn't have, so rather than identify that and see how it
could help his team, he counter-attacked me so I would consider my skills
useless and sign on to his twisted philosophies of life and tech writing.
Frankly, the guy was an old stick in the mud who refused to accept the
glaringly simple fact that life (and computer technology) moved along
without him. If I took his advice, I would be a miserable wretch clawing
my way up a ladder for a paltry $35,000 a year and dismissing Windows
users as all losers. Then one day I would get canned and have absolutely
no skills to sell to other employers. I'd be royally screwed.
If you have skills that go beyond traditional tech pubs, sell them on the
open market. Sell yourself as MORE than just a tech writer. This is why at
my company we call ourselves the "technical, technical writers". We're
more than just writers. We're skilled engineers and systems
administrators.
Some tech pubs managers will dismiss you and tell you that your skills are
worthless. Flip them. They're polishing brass on the Titanic. Appeal to
the engineering managers and vice-presidents who really can value tech
skills. Get away from these petty middle management types who just want to
break your spirit and build little tech pubs empires. An empire that
undoubtly has them at the top and you somewhere underneath agreeing with
everything they do.
Andrew Plato
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