Re: Linked-In: Your Skills' Desirability Is Cratering Year Over Year

[Mark Giffin <mgiffin -at- earthlink -dot- net>]

I notice the skills list glaringly did not include such late-model tech 
writer items as DITA, wikis, content management systems, and information 
architecture. So I think the list is suspect in some of the things it 
might imply for the tech comm industry.

That XML skills are down does not really surprise me, because "XML 
skills" are not something I usually see in ads for tech writers these 
days. My impression is that DITA has won the XML format battle, and 
general XML skills by themselves would be less in demand. All the DITA 
consultants I know are busy these days, including me. XML skills are 
included in that.

XML is no longer cool in much of the programming world. In web services 
and websites, it is usually replaced by the JSON format, which has many 
advantages on the web (mainly it's simpler, requires fewer bytes over 
the network, and is natively readable by JavaScript). But the tech comm 
world is not the programming world. Even the main popularizer of JSON, 
Douglas Crockford, says that JSON is not as good as XML for documents, 
which is what tech writers mainly use it for.

Weirdly, the only thing in the list that is up is "Writing: 1.4 M, +5%". 
I wonder what that means?

Mark Giffin