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!

The Story-Telling Trend

I was having coffee with someone yesterday to talk about his project, and I mentioned my background in creative writing, which led us to the current craze about story-telling.

There is even a med school program with a focus on storytelling for physicians, narrative medicine, which I think is such a great idea. Most doctors I’ve had couldn’t even listen long enough me to give them one sentence of information about my symptoms.

The gentleman yesterday had come to me knowing little about tech comm. In fact, he asked me about the term, “tech comm,” which he had seen sprinkled liberally throughout my blog. “Tech comm” is jargon for the industry of technical communication. Or, if you prefer, stories about using products.

He and I even laughed about his ad agency, which, sure enough, was touting story-telling as their focus. So is story-telling for products a stretch? Actually, no.

A five-step procedure might be technically accurate and pass QA, but a story-teller looks for signs that her audience is engaged. A good story is remembered and can be retold. This could be as simple as writing a short description that places the procedure steps in context. It could be examples. I’m excited to see what else it could be. I think this trend is gaining momentum.

All things being equal, hire the person who can write or speak the best. By definition, that means in story format. I recommend this for two reasons: a person who can tell stories can communicate with and motivate others, they can help define the narrative of the work they’re performing and plan to optimize that narrative, and they can do the same for themselves.

For me, that’s the main benefit of this blog: I tell myself the story of my career. When I take the time to articulate my experiences to myself, I can learn the most from them.

So, I’m a believer in the power of story-telling, even for specs and instructions. It’s just amusing to me that this isn’t obvious, and that companies can generate so much buzz by juxtaposing the term with their own industry jargon.

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.

I Want to Talk About Whether I’m Underpaid

To justify my earlier post about commuting by bus, I referred to low salaries for entry-level tech writers in companies that don’t fully value their tech comm departments. Then I proceeded to dig for statistics to back up that reference. I had some trouble with that. In fact, I found all kinds of indicators that tech writers have valued, well-paid positions. So now I’m on a mission to find out why that doesn’t resonate with me.

As soon as I realized that my question was whether I am underpaid, it occurred to me that I might not want to explore it on my blog. Like many companies, mine does not permit me to disclose my salary. But I think it’s gotten to the point that letting in a little sunlight can only help things.

My main concern is that my current salary is going to be the starting negotiation point for any future salary. If I’m truly at a disadvantage, I have the right to start thinking about how to handle that. I’m going to do that here with all the respect and caution that is due to my current employer.

If It’s Not Me

I work at a software company that has not stopped growing during the recession. I’m actually not entry-level—I’ve worked in the department four years and I educate myself about the industry. I am knowledgeable about our company’s internal processes and about several of our software systems. I document the new development of our flagship product, and I led the group that developed the new structure for our help systems.

The STC salary database gathers salary information from employers—it’s not a survey of technical communicators. The statistics are broken down geographically in several different ways. The one I always flip straight to is yearly compensation by metropolitan area (Full List of MSAs by State – Annual).

Average ages are given for each percentile group. The percentile groups are supposed to roughly correlate with levels of experience. If I look at the average annual salary for 10th percentile and the 25th percentile for 2008, for Tampa – St. Petersburg – Clearwater, I do not make either of these figures.

I’m in one of the highest paying industries, according to the salary survey (Other Information Services). And according to STC, over 90% of writers in my geographical area make more than me. Browsing technical writer salaries for Tampa on Glassdoor.com seems to support this, as well. What gives?

And It’s Actually Not Just Me

I am Vice President of our local STC chapter, and a significant portion of our group is looking for work. Some of them have been looking for months. Our last two chapter presidents were laid off during their terms. When our company has been hiring, I have felt confident telling people to apply because I feel our department is relatively secure. Is that the tradeoff? Or have I set the bar too low?

Recently, an entry-level position came open in our department. I am working with a student on a chapter project, and I wanted to recommend him for the position. He’s currently a manager with the company he’s working with while he’s in school. Accepting an entry level position with our company might well be a pay cut for him. Is that an unusual situation in tech comm?

I’ve only worked at one company as a technical communicator. Salary databases and word of mouth are all I have for making comparisons.

A Wish and a Spreadsheet – Chapter Planning

I haven’t written here much about being involved in STC (Society for Technical Communication). I am Vice President for the Suncoast chapter, which you might know if you follow me on Twitter or know me in real life.

For most of my tenure, what that has meant is that I put together the programs and jump in on most of the email discussions. Those things are essential, but I’m starting to get a larger vision of what it means to be a chapter officer.

Associate Fellow Steve Cascone is working right now on getting nominations for 2010-11 officers. He will look for potential presidents, vice presidents, treasurers, secretaries, and program coordinators. It’s fun to write those in plural form. This past year we had only a president, vice president, and “interim” treasurer (he was a very good sport).

I had a phone discussion with Steve on Saturday about who in the chapter might be interested in serving, and who we really hope is interested. Some people are obvious candidates, but have been burned out in the past and might enjoy regular old membership for a while.

Some members have already been presidents, vice presidents, and have served at the Society level. They act as advisers now (and run nominations committees). This is a chance to involve people who haven’t been involved before.

As for my new vision, I’d like for there to be a way for other people’s visions to get included. Our meetings are jam packed with announcements and presentations. Our planning meeting last year was a bit of a disorganized bust—this year I’ll take notes in real time using a projector and put them right up on our site (See the second tip in this article on meeting facilitation. Hooray for projectors). And have some method for rolling them into chapter plans in a measurable way.

I think another way for people’s personal goals for the chapter—for their needs to be met—is by making it easy for them to participate. I’ve been asked to break the chapter volunteer needs into discrete tasks that members can do without signing on for official roles, such as treasurer. So I have posted some tasks, by category, as Google docs. I’ll bring hard copies to our meetings, too, so people can sign up. These volunteer lists can be one way to get our plans tied to next actions.

I think there is still a place for officers, though, if we can get them. That structure works well for overall planning, and for having someone to bounce ideas off of, and for leading the efforts of the volunteers. Please, please let us get some officers this year. Please.