Trends for Technical Communicators

["Burns, Nancy" <nburns -at- BREAULT -dot- COM>]

The Tucson segment of the Phoenix (Arizona) chapter of STC hosted a panel discussion last night with three dynamic, informative speakers: Jody Heiken, immediate past president of the STC int'l board and a technical writer at Los Alamos; David Parnell, president and CEO of COREStaff, an outsourcing firm; and Lance Gelein a consultant in technical/marketing communications who is currently first VP of STC international. The subject was "Future Trends in Technical Communication", a panel discussion, and each speaker gave a 1/2-hour presentation about their perspective.  I'd like to share some of what I learned.

 

We as technical communicators need to consider ourselves as entrepreneurs who are striving to learn about our clients' needs and then finding the best solutions for meeting those needs, whether those clients are internal or external, whether we are free lancers or employees. If we don't think of ourselves in this light, our jobs may well be taken over by someone or some organization that does. The speakers also discussed core competencies, some of which are inherent (language skills, organization, ability to comprehend information) and others are learned.

 

Our continual pursuit of knowledge as communicators, our organizational abilities, interviewing skills, and ability to communicate effectively in a variety of forms (written and media), are all significant factors in our success. The willingness and facility of earning new tools to do our jobs more effectively is more important than knowing a specific hot tool of the year.

 

The tools we use today will, of course, be replaced in the future. Knowing a particular desk top publishing, help authoring, or web design publishing tool is not what makes us great communicators or what will make us successful. Unfortunately, too many hiring managers seem to focus on this and not other composite communication skills. But that's just another part of our job - to enlighten the decision makers.

 

Any thoughts, comments??

 

Nancy Burns
Senior Technical Writer
Breault Research Organization (BRO)
nburns -at- breault -dot- com
http://www.breault.com