Your Future in Technical Communication

by

Glenn Laing

Technical communication is about mastering the relentless pace of technological innovation — an impossible task, to be sure. Staying informed in any one field is hard enough, but technical communicators must master several fields at least well enough to explain them to the uninitiated.
Our amazing technology is also a major source of stress, and the revolution isn’t over. Even bigger changes are coming. Your only hope is to learn what’s new right now, get ready for what you don’t know, and deal with the stress of it all as best you can. Several of this past year’s programs addressed this theme, directly or indirectly, and provided advice for coping with constant change.

Here are some highlights:

• Pat Sweeney of the Bishop Company in Kalamazoo knows that technical writers do more than write, but he feels that the label "technical communicators" is too much of a mouthful. His solution: Bishop Company business cards identify Pat and his people as "explainers." One word says it all.
• At our St. Joseph Valley chapter old-timer’s reunion, Bill Mathews recommended adding grant writing to your skills. Non-profit and research funding is fiercely competitive, and a program’s success often rides on the quality of the grant request. That makes a good grant writer an income producer in an organization, rather than a cost center like other professional communicators.

Tom Mailloux conducted an on-line survey of educators and recruiters in technical communication and came up with the following advice based on their responses:

• Be a jack of all trades: know how to write, edit, and design a magazine feature, a technical manual, an ad layout, and a slide presentation. And learn how to adjust your tone to your audience: talk tech to techies and non-tech to non-techies.
• Mingle with everybody — engineers, sales people, management, distributors, dealers, etc. Learn how to talk to anybody, and learn as much as you can about everything. Don’t discriminate: no job is beneath you if you don’t know how to do it. Read a book, take a class, or talk to someone who knows.
• The long-heralded global market is here, and the attendant multilingualism has redefined our profession. We’re not longer "communicators," technical or otherwise. We’re now "interpreters" of information and everything we produce has to work well in a variety of cultures. Make it your goal to be bilingual (or trilingual) by 2000.

At our March meeting, STC region 4 director-sponsor Carol Carlson spoke on changes in STC and in the profession. Here are some of her points:

• The U.S. Department of Labor says our field will increase by 31% by 2005. However, they limit technical communication to "writing and editing"— certainly too narrow a definition.
• Another trend to watch for: a shrinking workforce, particularly in creative fields (due to an aging population, a declining birthrate, and AIDS), means a shortage of talent for years to come.
• Because of globalization and powerful new computer interfaces, graphics are more important than ever. Words alone are not enough. If you don’t understand the power of pictures, take a class or get to know an artist.
• Become a perennial student. Know how to install and maintain your own equipment (you can’t afford service) and learn the ins and outs of telecommunications. To stay in a learning mode, take classes just for fun. To stay current, seek out assignments involving the latest technology. "If someone asks if you know something," Carol added, "Always say ‘yes’ — and then learn it."

The pace of change can be so rapid that you may not know what to expect from one day to the next. To survive in such an environment, attitude is everything. The award for attitude this year goes to Perry Ballard, who told us: "If you kiss a toad first thing in the morning, everything else is wonderful!"

Originally published in the June 1995 issue of the Watermark.

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