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Re: outsourcing

Subject: Re: outsourcing
From: Dick Margulis <margulis -at- fiam -dot- net>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2003 12:38:43 -0500




Ed Wurster wrote:

----- Original Message ----- From: "Edwin Dahlquist" <Edwin -dot- Dahlquist -at- asu -dot- edu>


If you can't build better widgets at a competitive price, or you can't

provide

quality skills and services at a competitive price, get off the playing

field

and polish up your burger-flipping skills.
Thanks



How do I apply this to a technical writing career?



You apply this to a technical writing career by forgetting about having a technical writing career and asking a different question: how do I apply this to earning a reasonable living doing work I am qualified for and sometimes enjoy doing?

When you ask the question that way, you take the focus away from linear progression through fixed stages to which you advance because someone rewards you for doing well in the previous stage. Instead, you pull back to a wider angle and see that (a) what you are qualified to do may already consist of more than fill some corporate slot and in any case can change with time as you learn new stuff, on the job, through informal education, or through formal education; (b) what you enjoy doing may already be or may become in the future a superset of what you are now doing; and (c) what you can earn a reasonable living at depends entirely on how you market your abilities to potential customers/clients/employers.

Marketing yourself includes imagining ways you can add value to the other person's organization, products, or services. That implies proactively suggesting things you can do in this new environment to improve the bottom line. In any given organization that might mean:

• You manage/supervise/edit writing done offshore
• You bring your technical knowledge and way with words to the marketing department (they're certainly not going to offshore their writing assignments)
• You slide over to development and apply your skills to UI design/usability/design documentation
• You apply your skills and product knowledge as a business analyst
• Etc.

All of those, and more, leverage your technical writing abilities without locking you into a technical writing career path. And all of them benefit the company more than redesigning the user manuals for the umpteenth time would.


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References:
outsourcing: From: Edwin Dahlquist
Re: outsourcing: From: Ed Wurster

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