Inventory Your Technical Communication Skills
Making a shift from the classroom to independent technical writing means that you need a clear idea of what you have to offer clients. Of course, you might think you have a vast array of skills to offer, and don't need to waste time listing them. But if it makes any difference, I found that really you only offer one or two key skills in your independent work, and you do them very well. They make you your money.
Skills for the technical educator mutating into professional fall into two categories: the skills that you bring into the workplace and the skills you need to pick up. The first category of skills derive from the work you did in gaining your education and your subsequent teaching/professional career. The second category of skills you usually do not learn about until you’ve done some independent work and see what a difference they make in your success.
What Skills Do You Bring to the Workplace?
Writing and Editing
Researching information, drafting procedures and brochure copy, writing clear sentences, identifying errors and cleaning up text, re–organizing documents, converting documents into online formats, and proposal writing and editing. You have a chance to acquire these skills in your work as a teacher.
Graphics
Editing bitmapped, scanned images, draw conceptual overviews, capturing and labeling screens, pasting–up pages. The tools for this kind of work exist on your home PC as it comes from the box. You can familiarize yourself with new packages, especially the ones that do Web graphics, on your own time.
Teaching and Tutorial Writing
As a teacher you know how to structure a lesson, state objectives, design learning activities, and monitor progress. You're a natural for writing tutorial documentation and other getting–started pieces that clients love so much. You can really help a client keep costs down by writing procedures into a help file and producing a slim but highly focused getting–started brochure. Your skills as a teacher prepare you for this work. You can also handle classroom teaching in the computer training rooms that companies have.
Interviewing
As a researcher and teacher, you are used to interviewing other people for information. You know how to take notes and ask the right kinds of questions. You know how to write surveys and questionnaires about the audience, users, or other persons involved in a documentation project. You know how to sit down with a subject matter experts and get information to use in a manual.
Planning
You have experience planning people and resources for semester-long classes, so you should have some skills to apply to the planning of workplace projects. Not only can you plan a project, but you have the determination to carry it out.
Collaboration
You know how to collaborate in a writing project, how to delegate writing or researching responsibilities, and how to maintain quality among collaborators. You should, if you write articles, know the process of revision, editing, and proofreading that accompanies any production of valuable text.
The ability to take rejection
As a submitter of articles to scholarly journals or, worse, short stories to short story anthologies or magazines, you know what it means to get a manuscript back in the mail with a polite letter of rejection. You will need this ability in the workplace, because you get very few clients from among the very many potential clients to whom you pitch your services.
What Skills Might You Need to Pick Up?
As a teacher you bring a wealth of skills to the workplace that can give you a “service” to offer. However, you should look closely at those skills that you will need to acquire that perhaps your academic or moonlighting training might not have prepared you with. Consider the following list of such skills.
Bidding
Sizing up a software program on the spot, counting tasks, menus, screens, and options; giving a fixed–price bid or an estimate of the hourly rate. You don’t want to scare any potential clients away, but you don’t want to sell yourself too short. Finding just the right path between these conflicting goals can only come from experience. I shudder to think about it.
Contract Writing
How to write letters of agreement, non–disclosure agreements, formal contracts, informal contracts, and other legalistic documents. Luckily you can refer to Chapter 11 in this book for information on this topic. You can also get information about this on the Web site of the STC Consulting and Independent Contracting Special Interest Group.
Document Production
What processes to use for brochures, manuals, online documents of all sorts. Just because of their involvement in business, my clients (at least in some cases) knew more than I did about books, printing, and other elements of production than I did. My academic training had not prepared me for this.
Project Management
Organizing writers on real–world projects, sharing responsibilities for writing, planning and scheduling with other employees, flowcharting projects.
Hardware and Software Tools
You need experience with systems like Windows NT, UNIX, HTML and XML, and systems like FrameMaker, Ventura, PhotoShop, WinHelp, RoboHelp and other professional tools. It also helps to say you know a broad range of business programs and utilities, including WordPerfect, Quatro Pro, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Money, and various multi–media authoring tools. You can’t get practice and facility with this broad a range of programs in most academic work, and will need to acquire them to succeed.
Ability to Follow Formats
You think that you have control over format, and the cherished principles of things like balance and parallelism or task orientation. Perhaps, but for the most part you need a willingness to give up a theoretical format for a practical format, or more likely, a format that your client wants. Simple, meaningful words on the page represent the best value you can offer.
Handle Office Politics
You have to recognize the existence of a power situation existing in any office where you occasionally come for interviews, review meetings, and other interactions with clients. Because of the hands–off atmosphere in academic departments you may not handle the politics of an office or department as effectively as possible. Believe me, it is so easy to say something stupid at just about any time that it is a wonder I did not get thrown out a window. Here’s a for instance: I once just blithely walked into a dimly lit programmer’s area and started interviewing a subject matter expert to help me figure out how a print sequence worked. I got in major trouble for that, because the information I obtained, and used, became highly suspect later in the project by the person who believed she knew exactly how things worked, despite what the programmers said. Clearly I hadn’t followed channels, and clearly I lacked the skill in sniffing out these kinds of things.
The problem with these skills, the ones you need to pick up, lies in the fact that you can’t just take a crash course in them or read a book about them. You have to experience their lack, it seems, before you even know they exist or know enough to care about them. Face it, there is a fundamental difference between the nature of technical communication theory and research and technical communication as it is practiced in the workplace.