STC UUX Community Newsletter
Usability Interface

Ah, Spring!

By Karen Bachmann, UUX Manager

In the spring a young woman’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of … house cleaning. With apologies to Tennyson, I usually find cleaning on the top of my to-do list when spring arrives here in Florida. Beyond just the regular dusting, vacuuming, and so on, spring cleaning is more about putting my house in order: getting rid of things I no longer need or use, organizing what I need to do, and organizing what I have.

In this mood, I also take time to examine the state of my professional “house.” I realize that most of my job changes have taken place in the spring months—the ultimate professional “spring cleaning.” Even when a job change is not in order, I still have a list of tasks that I do.

The first and generally easiest task is making sure my résumé is up to date. I try to review my resume at least every six months to add new information and purge outdated information. I maintain two versions of my résumé: one that focuses solely on my usability work, and one that describes the broader set of my professional experiences. I make sure they effectively communicate my services as a contractor, either selling a focused usability specialist or someone with a range of skills to meet the job requirements.

I also review the state of my professional network. If I have made significant updates to my résumé, I send it to recruiters that I have worked with and past clients, if appropriate. I also look at professional networking opportunities in my area such as meetings of professional societies such as STC as well as general industry networking gatherings.

If I am actively looking for a new contract, I also update the job boards. I probably should do this task more often, but I prefer to be selective about my timing.

Another task is to evaluate my professional training and the skills I need to learn or grow. For me, this task is often about selecting my sessions for the STC conference and the UPA conference, which I attend regularly. But it also means looking for other education opportunities, including STC’s excellent seminar series, new courses at local universities, and other professional training.

I also ask what roles have I outgrown. This is likely the hardest of the professional spring cleaning tasks. How can you shed a role you no longer want to focus on the roles you do? If you are a full-time employee, this is the kind of question you can address in your annual review. Migrating your role within the same organization, however, can be challenging. I know others who, like me, started as technical communicators writing documentation and grew into usability with a dual role. It is a great way to start and may be the end goal for many. I found, however, that as I wanted to focus more or exclusively on usability, it was difficult to break away from my documentation responsibilities to develop my new usability skills. I ultimately needed to change jobs (resulting in my tendency to change jobs in spring) to somewhere I was known only or primarily for my usability role. If I donned the technical communicator hat, I could balance the workload between usability tasks and documentation tasks to meet my professional growth needs.

I hope you find these professional spring cleaning ideas useful. I would love to hear what you do. Please consider sharing your professional spring-cleaning tips on the UUX discussion list.