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If you're feeling insecure about your professional prospects, you're in good company. The world has changed, your cheese has moved,* and it's high time to face facts: most high-tech technical communicators have become commodities, purveyors of expensive and increasingly unvalued services.
Globalization, a shrinking economy, impatient customers, and increasingly lean, “do-more-with-less” companies are now the norm. Especially in high-tech, product quality deteriorates but users seem to care only about initial cost. Meanwhile, technical communicators have become passive and disengaged from their audience, their compensation rates are trending downward, job security has become a joke, and true professional advancement is rare. Job satisfaction is the exception rather than the rule.
What to do? Bluntly, technical communicators must create profits. If what you do doesn't make your employer or client money – lots of it, quickly, and with minimal friction (i.e., effort on their part) – your future's bleak. Contrast this with the recent past, when saving companies money (for example, with online-only deliverables, single sourcing, and structured authoring) or improving customer satisfaction (for example, with more accurate, clear, complete, or accessible content) alone were sufficient hiring justifications. You now have to do all three: be profitable, efficient, and helpful.
My view is that high-tech technical communicators' best option is to apply their skills to other industries, and to focus on helping customers generate profits. I don't have many specific answers to the “where from here” question, but I hope to catalyze (with insights, anecdotes, hope and, yes, fear) a productive discussion about how to respond to the marketplace's challenges.
* Who Moved My Cheese?: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life, by Spencer Johnson and Kenneth Blanchard, Sept 1998.
Andrew Davis
Andrew Davis runs Synergistech Communications, a recruiting firm that since 1995 has matched talented technical communicators with staff and contract opportunities in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Andrew is a former Technical Writer of system administration and software developer documentation for companies such as Oracle (documenting relational databases on minicomputers), IBM (UNIX hypertext authoring tools), Informix (Windows database tools), Network Equipment Technologies (PBXs and routers), and Verity (enterprise text search tools). He's well-connected in Silicon Valley's software and telecommunications documentation communities. He also recruits technical trainers and instructional designers, medical writers, and user experience (UX) professionals.
Synergistech seeks to be the ultimate transparent, trustworthy, targeted search firm. It focuses only on technical communications opportunities, discloses full details about its (very modest) markup, provides detailed descriptions of its clients' requirements and preferences, and keeps applicants apprised of their current status -- the bad news as well as the good. Synergistech has a well-deserved reputation as the technical communicator's ally, so even if it can't find you the job or contract of your dreams, it encourages jobseekers and hiring managers alike to read and heed the advice shared at its site, www.synergistech.com.
Synergistech is currently doing on-demand recruiting, namely “speaking when spoken to” rather than marketing its services actively. Most of its efforts are focused on developing a web-based job-seeking product for SF Bay Area technology workers.
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