February
5, 2009
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"What's
Next, Doc? Glimpsing the Opportunity Beyond the Impasse"
by Andrew Davis
If you're feeling insecure about your professional prospects,
you're in good company. The world has changed 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
focus on helping customers generate profits. I don't have
many specific answers to the 'where from here' question,
but hope to catalyze (with insights, anecdotes, hope and,
yes, fear) a productive discussion about how to respond
to the marketplace's challenges.
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Speaker
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
Andrew can't find you the job or contract of your dreams,
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 San Francisco Bay Area technology
workers
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