Career
7 Ways for Technical Writers to Re-invent Themselves & Demonstrate their Value
The Technical Writing Dept is closing. What do you do?
This is a fact of life for many people today. Indeed, there is now a real fear that US technical writers will continue to lose their jobs to offshore companies, e.g. India & Poland.
Let’s look at what you can do to re-invent yourself and find new work opportunities.
7 Steps to Reinventing Yourself
The first thing is that you have to change your perception of yourself. You’re not a name tag – stop thinking of yourself as a technical writer.
You’re a person who makes a living by developing technical documentation. Stop looking at your job description. Honest, let it go. What services can you offer that others can’t? If you’ve worked in tech comms for 10 years, you must know something that a graduate doesn’t, right? What is it?
- Define your core strengths – what’s the one skill you have about all others that you can really sell. It may not be writing. For me, it’s creating videos with Camtasia.
- Develop a social network plan – create base-camps on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other media channels. But work especially hard on LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/ivanwalsh). This is where the real action is, especially if you want to network. I can’t push this enough. You have to be on LinkedIn.
- Identify three people you trust – create a small team and go hunting for work. It’s easier to combine your strengths than go alone. This is the single biggest mistakes that people make. Don’t go it alone. Find people that you trust (or can learn to trust) and start a dialogue with them. Baby steps.
- Endorsements – use these to build credibility and attract new clients. Remember LinkedIn, well these go a long way here. Use these recommendations to build trust. There are 3 of you so it should be easier to swap/exchange contacts and make things happen.
- Differentiate – if everyone is doing social media, you can be sure there is a gap elsewhere. Here are some ideas.
- Adobe PageMaker templates development
- PDF to Word conversion
- Structured Authoring classes (valuable to business analysts)
- Visio diagramming (very popular with consultancy firms as they do lots of business process engineering)
- Find a project – don’t worry about the money. The key is to get a real live project that you can work together as a team. Use this to land future work.
- Start now – even if you are fully employed now, you can start today. Get networking. See who you can work with and how you can work together.
Opportunities I see in Asia today
I was asked recently if technical writers today are ‘no more than a commodity’? I know what the person meant; they felt they were being treated like one.
My response was that (said in a very gentle way…) they need to redefine their position as a technical writer or they will fall further and further down the food chain. Not nice, but true.
I did some consultancy with for a large US home appliance-maker here (fridges etc) in Beijing to help them knock their docs into shape. Most were written by Chinese university graduates, smart kids, but who’d never lived in an English-speaking country. The docs, reports, & (some marketing) material all reflected this. There was a lot of rework involved.
Despite the poor quality of these docs, the company has committed to this strategy and will continue to invest here. In the end, the documentation will improve.
Why?
Because western tech writers are coming here, learning some Chinese and working in the trenches. What they’ve learnt will be passed to the Chinese writers in time.
But, for US writers (and those in wealthy western countries) , they need to find ways to move out of the services/commodity area fast — otherwise their salary will continue to fall/stagnate and the opportunities will continue to dry up.
Takeaways
Don’t follow the crowds. Find an area where you can specialize and then dominate it. If possible, extend this into your social media network but keep some things to yourself as others may try to come in and steal your thunder.
3 often works quite well, e.g. a designer, coder and writer. Of course, you can always scale up later. For me it’s all down to where and how you can ‘add value’.
