The Old School Itch

I am thinking of going back to school. Again.

Some of you might remember last year when I failed calculus pretty decisively during my first semester of what was possibly going to be a computer science degree. I think I left out the actual failing part, but that’s what happened. That was an online class, though–I know I could have done it in a traditional class.

I’m driven by a couple of things–I want to keep advancing in tech comm or just build something new, and I just plain want to keep learning. I know there are other ways to avoid career plateaus than by going back to school. There are other ways to get technical skills. I can dream up plenty of innovative projects that don’t necessitate me taking a class, right? The thing is, I keep feeling this nagging limitation.

What if I want to build something completely different?

It’s like when I was trying to write songs, and I could sing, but I can’t play an instrument. I know there are singers who do it, but for me it was frustrating. I could find musicians to play with, but I wanted more input. So I learned enough guitar to sketch some songs.

Is it me or the tech comm industry that is at a plateau?

At the companies where I’ve worked (and from talking to people, this doesn’t seem uncommon) documentation is a by-product that is approached later in the product cycle, when the product is stable, and past the point at which people have any energy for the all the benefits it can offer if one is innovative.

When I talk about personas, and sales opportunities, they look at their watches and wonder why I am not just writing it, already. I’m becoming pretty well-versed in the benefits of good user documentation that is part of a larger strategy, but there simply doesn’t seem to be much space for making the argument.

So, I’m going to need more credibility.

And more technical skill. Where I’m at now, the product people and even some of the marketing people are engineers. My impression is that they think personas are cute, at best.

Some of that will be alleviated by me getting more experience. People out there are doing these innovative things with tech comm, and seeing the benefits, and it’s the company that’s missing out when I fail to get the message across, or when they just don’t have ears to hear it. But when the rest of the features in the product are being built based on intuition and domain expertise, why should I expect the help to get treated to more empirical methods?

I’m not oblivious to the fact that I got all wound up like this last time, and that it might pass as soon as I get another project that’s shiny to me.

For now, it’s giving me plenty of blog post ideas.

This is the question I want to answer: do advanced degrees (or additional degrees) for technical communicators pay off?

This can be broken into several parts/posts: how much do technical communicators make with various bachelor degrees or less, how much more do they make with additional degrees, how is that different in different parts of the U.S. and in different parts of the world? How do the degrees contribute to other factors of job satisfaction? Which degrees help the most for which jobs? Do other skills or circumstances play a bigger role in salary and satisfaction?

In the meantime, I’m looking at Illinois Institute of Technology or Illinois State for one of these degrees:

• Graduate Certificate in Systems Analysis
• MS or BS in Information Architecture (not sure which makes more sense, yet)
• BS in Computer Science

Squee!

Self Employment, Meet Family Planning

I have a COBRA letter sitting on my desk, and it’s been there for weeks, pressuring me to decide whether I’m 100% sure I want kids. And if so, like, when?

I quit my job this summer, moved to Chicago, and took contract positions. I’m so glad. The timing was pretty good as far as my skill level, and I’m working plenty. I can definitely afford health insurance, but maybe not health insurance with a pregnancy rider. I’ve got to spend more time comparing the prices to my budget.

So, COBRA seems like it might be a good choice. If I want to get pregnant within the next five months.

18 months of coverage, minus nine months of pregnancy, minus the three months that will have already passed by the time I make this decision, minus a month for whatever I’m not considering.

Five months to figure it out, or else I’ll have to wait a year to be eligible for the coverage I’d be paying out the nose for with a pregnancy rider. I’ll be 32 in December. I want to stay independently employed for a while and maybe launch a company next year.

I’ve been thinking about these things for a month or so, but this weekend, a shit storm erupted online over Penelope Trunk’s TechCrunch post, “Women Don’t Want To Run Startups Because They’d Rather Have Children.”

It’s really a remix of previous posts (I’ve been a reader of hers for a year or so) about how women do not need to put off children for their careers, plus news about her startup’s recent move, wherein she chose to stay put and be with her family.

I tried looking up research to determine how valid Penelope’s assertion is regarding the genetic cliff of age 35, but I didn’t find much. Only a couple articles related directly to the question, one of which contained a grammatical error that would make me want to scrutinize the site a bit more before I would trust anything on it. (Here’s the better one.) I checked Mayo Clinic’s site, and age was mentioned as a factor in fertility.

Look, Penelope’s strengths are not careful use of statistics or diplomatic wording of her ideas. Her strength is juxtaposing career-related trends in innovative ways, or in pragmatic ways. Like, maybe Power Point slides about your sex life are not as bad as people are making them out to be, or maybe it’s really not worth reporting sexual harassment. Except she usually leaves out the “maybe.” I walk away from her posts with a look-up list, not a to-do list.

So, the TechCrunch article lacks nuance, and it doesn’t apply to everyone. But for those of us who do want children, who weren’t anywhere near the top of the ladder by 27, and who are considering starting our businesses and our families at the same time, it’s a point of reference.

Exactly how hard is this going to be? From a project management standpoint, am I scheduling my newborn sleepless nights at the same time as my 100-hour weeks? If I’m not with my husband or my future husband yet, am I leaving myself enough hours in my week for a social life that will let me find him? Where are my hacks for these issues?

I’m simply not going to stand for anyone telling me it’s taboo to discuss these questions on the internet. I don’t care if they are women entrepreneurs with kids.

The “worst article on the internet ever”? “You’ve taken us back 50 years”? Let’s take it down a notch, people. By reacting with such vitriol, you could be shutting down women for whom these issues are relevant. By reacting with hysteria, you are not representing yourselves well to the venture capitalists you’re so concerned about.

If feminism were that fragile that one article could set it back so much, we would have bigger problems than one author. Are people really angry because it’s detrimental to the cause, or because it cuts on a personal level?

I’d like to see more discussion about how to structure a startup that works better with a family. I know that people end up losing their marriages and being heartbroken over missing their kids. Please, please don’t make them jump through PC hoops of fire to share those experiences.

I don’t want to hear about how “but she shouldn’t speak for all women, so that gives me the right to curse at her on Twitter or call her a disgrace.” That’s high school, and I don’t have time for it. I want to hear about what works.

Doing the Stop-and-Think

Miscellaneous Sources

Penelope Trunk has written several posts about asking good questions. One of them was about not asking the direct question you want to ask, but asking something else. Don’t ask for a date, but make small talk. Actually, the post is about negotiating, but negotiating is a form of asking.

This has been rattling around in my head lately, because I have been attacking this problem of career advancement head on for so long now, with such slow success. I’ve worked methodically on my soft skills, and my core skills, and I at least know what technical skills I need to develop, even though I don’t get to practice them at my job.

I love meeting people in STC and other places, so my network is growing all the time, and I can’t help myself but to learn more about writing and taxonomies and all things information—I’m moving in the right direction. But so much of this worry about salaries and projects and poker faces has been so joyless. Where is the charmed success I used to enjoy before I got into the work world? I think I mistakenly left something behind in my rush to be a serious grown up.

One of my current favorite bands, Mew, write songs inspired by dreams. Their music is technically complex, and each song is a coherent composition with a definite mood or idea. It seems like they achieve these successful songs by this indirect, intuitive approach.

What should I be asking myself about work? What approach is both intuitive and strategic? What feels more like me and not like some desperately-applied career advice?

What I want to ask myself is, “Can I even be happy as an employee anymore? What if I actually got paid enough that money wasn’t such an issue anymore? Don’t I want to live in a bigger city at some point in my life? How can I be a snowbird between Chicago and St. Pete before I retire?” I haven’t decided whether those are exactly the things I should be asking myself, though, or if those questions are way too obvious.

These People Give Me Hope

Ben Minson blogged about how being a technical writer for his church has given his work extra meaning. A couple of people have suggested to me recently that branching out and adding more skills would take the edge off. Seth Godin and Gina Trapani have advised to think in terms of ultimate outcomes, rather than piddly projects. This is all helping me, but also bringing some difficult decisions to the surface, as I admit to myself that some of my projects and priorities conflict with each other. Good thing I’m reading The Dip, a book about when to quit and when not to. Yeesh.

In his recent interview with Penelope Trunk, Godin recommended looking at people whose gigs you want and finding out how they got those gigs. Here’s a list of people whose gigs I want:

• Amy Goodman – The quality, consistency, and fearlessness of her work amazes me.
• Penelope Trunk – It has helped me to read such candid posts–I don’t know if she thinks of it this way, but I consider it to be a very giving thing. And I love the idea of not wasting so much time figuring out what not to share.
• Rahel Bailie – I’m quite interested in content strategy, and I admire her ability to sell it as a bottom-line necessity.
• Ira Glass – This American Life is well-done, long-running, and addictive.
• Sue Heltzel – My aunt is good at everything she decides to do, and she’s gotten herself to where she wanted to be – surrounded by grandbabies and working her own business.
• Paul Farmer – His work, bringing medical care to rural Haiti, has been beyond obsessed, for sure qualifying as out-of-balance. But how else do you accomplish something this big in Haiti?

There are other people I could list, many of them journalists. I am trying hard not to be so drawn to journalism.

Do the Stop-and-Think

The Dip has me asking myself—what can I be the very best at? I need to get very specific about this. I want to travel, work out my house, not sit at a desk the entire day, write, share information, and work on things I care deeply about. I want my own business, or a partnership with family or friends. But is that the smartest thing for right now?

So, I expect my immediate future to be filled with much sitting and thinking, and writing. As always, it helps me to talk to you all about it, too.

Give the Big Picture First

The Big H

During a recent business writing training at work, the instructor led us through an exercise on giving instructions. She had a man stand at the board with his back to the audience. Then she gave a woman in the audience a piece of paper with a big, block-letter H on it. The H had some sections shaded, and some patterned. The exercise was to describe the H so that the co-worker at the board could recreate it.

The woman started describing horizontal, vertical, and parallel rectangles. She jumped right into size and shape specifications, and we giggled as the drawing grew more and more misshapen. It would have helped, before giving specs, if she had said something like, “You’re going to be drawing a big H.”

How to Drive Me Crazy, Turn-by-Turn

A couple of weeks ago, my boyfriend and I were leaving an open house at my boss’s husband’s scooter shop, and I was driving. It’s only a few miles from my house, but I needed directions, so my boyfriend looked it up on his BlackBerry.

I just needed to know if I was headed in the right direction. I needed to get to a main road that I recognized and find out which way to turn on that road. He wanted to tell me to turn right on this side street, than left on that side street, step-by-step.

“Turn right on 4th St,” he said, peering at the BlackBerry’s tiny screen.
“And then what?”
“Turn right on 30th Ave.” He scrolled a little more.
“And then what?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No, you’re not getting another ‘then what.’” I think he was offended that I didn’t trust he was reading me the steps correctly, but that wasn’t it at all. I was distracted by the certainty that, really, it didn’t matter which road I turned on as long as I knew which general direction I was headed. Maybe I could pick a better street than this dinky side road that Google had selected for me.

After I pulled over and confiscated the BlackBerry, I got back on the same road going the same direction that I was on when he looked up the directions. I confirmed I was going the right way and memorized the list of streets I had to turn on. After that, I checked back in with him occasionally for details–to make sure I was turning the right way.

Yes, I was the kid that couldn’t do math until I understood why the formulas worked. Yes, I need the big picture first. Is that so unusual? Because it reminds me of our department’s new approach to writing task topics.

The Big Picture has a Template

We are going with a textbook implementation of structured authoring (task, concept, and reference topics), using a help-authoring tool to manage the content, rather than DITA or a CMS.

We already had a format that specified where to include procedures and where to include window descriptions. That put us ahead of some other shops in moving to structured authoring. But we had no official place for “what,” “why,” and “where,” or for reference information that wasn’t a window description. That type of information was stuffed in awkwardly and inconsistently, or left out completely. Our job now is to extract it and identify the gaps.

As we improve our content with this new format, our clients will be increasingly able to choose the correct “how,” the correct instructions, because they’ll have more of the big picture.

Writing my own Concept Topics

I have been asked, “Don’t you ever turn off?” (I do. It’s called Lost.) I have been told that I “live and breathe” tech comm (uncomfortable squirming). I have learned to slow my breathing and relax my hands during style discussions.

I am starting to wonder if tech comm warrants the energy I put into it.

Why learn markup languages? Why blog? Why earn the political capital, persist in getting around barriers to user research to learn which of our users are the ones who register patients, how much training they had, and which pages of the manual they have at their workstation, all the while operating under the probability that if it weren’t for the federal regulation that requires my deliverables I would be out the door? Is it really just because I like to problem-solve?

I have never been a person who is very motivated by fear of losing my job. Job preservation isn’t what’s lighting my fire.

I love the nature of the work—advocating for users, methodically studying their motivations, crafting and sorting content. I am tiring, though, of content about windows and buttons. I am reflexively competitive, and passionate, and creative. It’s time for me be more conscious about what I’m using that for. I don’t want to get to the end of my career and find that I’ve completed the equivalent of a big Rubik’s Cube.

Increasingly, I think tech comm is part of my “how.” I’ll be working on extracting my “why.” If it suits you, it would very much help me to hear about yours.

What if STC Already Has What Gen Y Wants?

I’ve been wanting to write about this since Ben Minson posted about it and gave his take on what the next generation, Gen Y, wants from the Society for Technical Communication (STC). I think Ben hit on some good points, and I wanted to explore some of the gut feelings I’ve gotten from the general rejection of STC I have experienced by younger writers. Something just isn’t clicking for them in their perception of our group.

I am usually the youngest person at the Suncoast STC meetings, and I am technically Gen Y by some definitions, although not by McCrindle’s.

The last generational quiz I took, though, I did not score highly as a millennial. And I am sometimes baffled by people just a few years younger than me. Like how most of the people my age and younger almost fall asleep after my first sentence about STC. What is it about my message that doesn’t sound valuable to them?

Time Magazine says Gen Y wants flexibility during the workweek and they want to be with their friends.

Suncoast chapter meetings are another stop at the end of the day where I’ve got my work hat on. It’s a social work hat, because I talk to people non-stop the whole time I’m there, but it’s a work hat, nonetheless. And, if I’m not making myself talk to strangers, I’m not getting the most out of the meeting.

There is usually a presenter, so theoretically, a member could listen to the presentation and slip away with nary a conversation, but the ambassadors of our group don’t let newbies go ungreeted. By the end of the night, I can feel that I’ve exerted myself socially and mentally, but the payoff is a network of people who think of me primarily as a tech writer and who would help me find another job if I needed one.

Does Gen Y have this through other means, or is the format so far outside of their comfort zone that it prevents them from making the comparison? How can we leverage the social networks of chapter members to strengthen the group? How important is it to sponsor purely social events for the chapter?

McCrindle’s says that management style and workplace culture matter more to Gen Y than to previous generations.

I wonder if this means that one bad networking event experience can be the kiss of death for future efforts. If Gen Y is networking other places more comfortably, why try another professional group if you have been to a meeting where the group leaders seem stressed or resistant to change, or where the senior members were know-it-alls, or where the path to mentorship and benefit was otherwise needlessly obscured?

As volunteers in a dynamic group, we only have so much control over the tone of the group, but what we can tweak, we should. I’ll be taking another look at the format of our meetings.

B.NET says Gen Y wants to work with the latest technology.

Now that I’ve had time to adjust to them, I have a healthy respect for listservs. But I did shake my head in disbelief at first. I don’t think anyone has a healthy respect for our chapter’s web site, though.

STC-ers are all over Twitter. But is Gen Y? Not according to C.NET. And not if my department is any indicator, either.

Tech writers, information architects, information developers – some of us get to work with some exciting communication technology. What are some ways we could be making better use of technology to let Gen Y know that?

What STC Definitely Does Have to Offer

All the sources I mentioned say that Gen Y expects to job hop in order to find opportunity. STC offers a version of this.

You can start out as a competition judge or a phone tree caller, then be a chapter leader. Or, you can volunteer remotely in a special interest group (SIG), which are STC’s online communities. Once you have had success as a community leader, there are Society-level positions, some of which are even paid.

Call me crazy if those folks don’t get work as a result of their involvement, and they get a large group of genuine friends, too.

Many STC members work for themselves, travel nationally and internationally for work, staying with their STC friends on assignments generated by their STC associations. They have control over what they wear to work, how the business operates, and who they work with. I think we have what Gen Y wants, we just need to make sure that our message makes entry into the group palatable.