The Shifting Technical Writing Market

Here's a disturbing statistic: According to a recent study, there are more technical writing jobs available than there are writers to fill them.
Run that by me again?

If there is a technical writer shortage, why then are there unemployed writers? And if you are unemployed, well, does being unemployed mean that you aren't very good at your chosen profession?

Let me answer the second question first: No. In my experience, the job weeds out those who aren't very good at it. The fact is that technical writing is one of the most demanding professions a person can practice. If you have survived and done reasonably well for more than two or three years, you're doing just fine.

Now for the first question. I believe that technical writers, by and large, do a poor job of marketing themselves in a competitive business. We cannot simply send resumes out anymore and expect the employers to come to us. The market moves too quickly for that. And business is changing: We're about to start moving even faster.

Business Acumen and Self-Promotion: The high tech industry is undergoing radical change -- as if that were anything new. But the change isn't happening so much in the area of technology as it is in the area of business intelligence. Well-run businesses are market driven, not technology driven, so it is important to understand not only the technology of the products we document, but the business problems that the technology solves. Writers must therefore also understand their company's business in a much broader way than ever before and learn to apply that business knowledge in the creation of new information products.

Technical writers must evolve. We must reinvent ourselves and be market-driven if we wish to remain employed and have interesting, challenging work to do. The days of being able to pull out a few binders full of detailed specifications that you can distill into a nice installation, configuration, or maintenance manual are long gone for most of us. Companies can no longer afford to have engineers "wasting" their time producing specifications.
Rapid development techniques have become the prime movers of today's product development cycles, fracturing traditional business, production,and documentation processes and requiring us all to approach what we do differently.

Trend Spotting: We must stay on top of the business and development trends that allow us to survive and thrive in today's business world. Today's hottest trends for technical writing include:

- Deep integration of technical writers into early development cycles to help create design specifications. Such specifications represent much of the company's intellectual capital, which is worth millions. Who better to manage the recording and maintenance of engineering intellectual property than a technical writer?

- The need for better technical marketing materials. White papers, competitive analyses, business intelligence, newsletters, data sheets, and technical product stories deliver compelling information to potential customers. Advertising gimics do not work -- people want to read about the benefits that your company's technology delivers.

- The need for consistent proposals and technical sales materials. The large account selling process is a game of inches, won by those account teams who present the most consistent message to the potential customer. Technical writers can create request for proposal (RFP) databases that enable busy sales people to assemble consistent, accurate RFPs. And they can maintain those databases far more effectively than a sales person or sales engineer can. Help the sellers sell, and you help yourself -- and those around you -- stay employed.

- The death of user guides. User guides are catalogs of user interface design errors. Technical writers must move deeper into the product management and development cycles to influence and help improve product usability. Though sometimes a hard sell, it is imperative that technical writers and their managers increase their personal marketing efforts to educate product management and engineering development. Technical writers are, after all, among the first users to figure out a product. Why not make use of that to help improve product usability?

- Web site content creation and maintenance. Technical writers are uniquely positioned to address the Web site content creation and maintenance problem. Good corporate Web sites feature useful, updated content to offer customers information that helps them solve their business problems.

- Knowledge management. Technical writers instinctively know that knowledge management is the record of a company's collective wisdom. Technical writers will play key roles in capturing that knowledge and making it accessible by those who need it.

- The demand for expertise in specialty areas. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that the need for writers with expertise in areas such as law, medicine, and economics will likely increase because of the continuing expansion of scientific and technical information and the need to communicate it to others.

Now more than ever before, technical writers must learn to market and promote themselves, and add business acumen to the skills they offer. In so doing, we make a better work life for ourselves and for the people we serve.

By: Michael Knowles