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What color is your future job: commodity writer
or strategic communicator?
by Rahel Bailie, Region 7 Director-Sponsor
This month, I found myself in Portland, Oregon, for the STC board meeting and the Willamette Valley's season kick-off meeting, which the chapter organized to coincide with the board meeting. The topic was the future of technical communication, a panel discussion that included a workforce analyst, two STC board members, and two local technical communicators who weathered the turndown in the economy and embody the characteristics of career survivors.
As context for the panel discussion, it happens to be that Oregon is the hardest hit state of all the US. Many software development jobs have been sent offshore, and the technical communication jobs that accompanied those jobs dried up, as well. Even in companies retaining their North American-based staff, the continual effort to trim "waste" continues to erode jobs in departments seen as cost centers.
"Commodity writing" is the type of technical communication characterized as the creation of formulaic documentation on demand, and is closely tied to writing code. Companies are increasingly comfortable outsourcing both of these tasks. Those are the jobs being sent offshore, as evidenced by the surge in job openings on STC job boards in the Asia-Pacific countries.
Increasingly, the jobs that remain are for "strategic communicators," technical writers who can be entrusted to look beyond the pages of their manuals, beyond the screens of documentation, beyond the department of documentation, and even beyond the GUI. These strategic communicators look at the product from a business point of view and ensure they contribute to the bottom line through their contributions to the company's product. The actual contribution may be content, user-centered design, or specific communications products, but the content arises from a perspective of problem-solving. The successful strategic contributor is recognized by management as a valuable part of the team, and may be part of the management team. (See Andrea Ames' presentation slides at www.stcwvc.org.)
What impressed me were the remaining panelists who embodied the principles of strategic communication. Sheila Reitz, a contractor for an Oregon power company, made a conscious choice to move from commodity work to strategic communication. Using a performance-based résumé—coincidentally, I discuss these techniques in "Using a Résumé to Showcase Your Talents" in the September/October 2003 issue of Intercom—Reitz demonstrated her ability to contribute her analytical and communication skills documenting work flow processes. As a result, her first phone call to user-test the new résumé format resulted in a landing a dream contract, when her tester exclaimed, "We need you!"
The landscape for technical communications has changed, and will continue to change. Whether you are a technical communicator outside of North America who is benefiting from the windfall of technical writing jobs coming to your area, or a technical communicator called upon to stretch your imagination, the quest is the same one posed by Dick Bolles, author of What Color Is Your Parachute?: Which of my skills fills the changing needs in the local market, and how can I market myself to meet those needs?
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