How’s the job market?

Despite the problems in the economy, I’m not seeing big layoffs in our profession yet.

(I probably just jinxed myself with that statement.)

The Center for Disease Control is hiring a Technical Writing Editor. Check out the bureaucratic hoops you have to jump through for that position. 

Oracle also is advertising an open position. 

Most of the other job postings I saw were contract positions, including a couple at ProEdit. If you’re willing to relocate to Huntsville, Alabama, they do have “permanent” job there. 

Mike Hughes had some good advice on getting through the recession. 

I think flexibility is another good strategy in this market. Draw on all your experience and use it sell your versatility. An STC member I know, for example, just got hired at my company as a Business Analyst. 

This month’s Atlanta STC program explains how to write federal proposals. A good tech writer should be able to make that transition easily. It’s structured writing, with its own terminology, tight deadlines, a collaborative effort that has to be managed like a project. Sound familiar? 

Remember, this month’s meeting is at Southern Poly State U.

A typical day

The prolific Susan Wu described her “Typical Day as a Technical Writer” last March. At the risk of boring you to death, I will do the same here. 

8:24 am
Pat dogs, kiss husband, and leave home for work. Listen to Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography on CD in the car. Tears come to my eyes when Schulz’s mother says to Charles as she is dying of cancer, “If we get another dog, let’s call him Snoopy.” What a way to start the day. 

8:45 am
Arrive at work and boot up computer knowing it will take at least 15 minutes before I can read e-mail. Brings to mind the article in Sunday’s New York Times about this universal annoyance. Researchers are working on a cure. 
Two of the four writers on my team will be in the office today. The other two work for other clients on Tuesdays. 
Grab a cup of tea in the kitchen. For the second day in a row I find free cupcakes on the counter. Can I resist? 

9:00 am 
Head down to CIO’s office with my director and the other manager in my group. This is a weekly meeting where we report on what we’re doing. Currently I have about 10 separate projects creating user guides, online Help, training materials, and training content. The other manager is in charge of records management and has even more projects underway. As the meeting wraps up we lament our diminishing 401Ks and our increasing years until retirement.

On the way back to my office I run into a friend from our California office who is in town for meetings this week. We went through some hectic times last year on another project so it’s great to see her again. 

10:00 am
Read, answer e-mail, and listen to voice mail, rewrite my to-do list.

Unsubscribe from three lists I never signed up for. My title is Manager, Technical Communications and lots of people think I’m in Telecommunications. Further evidence that everyone just skims instead of reading today.
Howard from Atlanta STC asks if I’ve reserved a room for the November Council meeting. I confirm.  

Another former co-worker has asked to link up with me on LinkedIn. I accept. Hurray, I’m have over 200 connections now. 

10:30 am   
Call internal customer who needs our help writing a brief user guide and back-end manual. Discuss deadlines, who will be single point of contact, etc. Call writer to ask if she has bandwidth to take this on. She does not. Consider who else to assign to this job. 

Another manager on my floor pops his head in the door to say that I have to move my contractor who is squatting in one of “his” cubes. Luckily, there is another vacant cube for him to move. Otherwise, he’s condemned to the cramped “bull pen.” I dutifully submit a move request and inform the employee. He’s cool with it. 

11:00 am  
Receive a draft of a user guide from one of my off-site writers. Begin editing. 

Phone rings. Someone from Legal needs another online course set up ASAP. I promise the world and then look at my list of projects and my calendar to see how I can deliver. 

Manager of contracting firm e-mails to ask how his employee is doing. I send back a glowing report. 

11:30 am
We are preparing to deliver an instructor-led course to employees on Word 2007. I’m reviewing the outline we created and thinking about useful exercises. 

12:00 pm   
Lunch bell rings (in my head).
I decide to do something I’ve been thinking about for several days. Next door they are building a mixed-use development. Today it’s just a big hole with a big pile of dirt next to it. I go to the top of the parking deck and take a picture. Resolve to take one picture each day until the structure is built. Then I’ll put it on YouTube (or something).  What the hell, I’ll get some exercise walking to the 8th floor and back each day.

Grab a salad at the cafeteria in the next building. While I’m eating, check out Twitter.

12:30 pm   
Write short set of instructions needed to update our timekeeping manual and online Help. Determine appropriate environment (dev, UA, QA, or TRAIN) to capture screenshots, which user to represent, dates to choose, etc. 

Finish editing the document I began this morning and send to writer. 

2:00 pm
Daily meeting for one of my key projects. It’s not an Agile project, but sometimes it feels that way. 

2:15 pm   
Finalize travel plans for trip to NY plant in early December.  Answer more e-mail and go in search of answers to other queries. 

3:00 pm
Weekly one-on-one with most senior (in years, not age) employee. She is wearing several hats and overworked, too. I offer help, consolation, cheap advice. We agree to a cram session on the Word classes in late December when most people are out of the office.  

3:45 pm
Husband calls to say he’s taking the dogs to walk on the river. Would I leave early to join them? I sigh and decline. Confirm that we’ll have salmon for dinner and green peas. Check out the stock market while I’m talking to him. The Dow is up!!

4:00 pm
Go to the kitchen to wash out my tea mug and notice that two of the six Halloween cupcakes are still on the counter. Take deep breath and return to desk sans cupcake.  

4:05 pm
Call contact in Accounting who promised to deliver training content to us today. She confirms she will send it today.
Stop by “hotel cube” where my friend from California is catching up on e-mail. We talk about pets, holidays, travel. She has dinner plans with other out-of-towners who are here for the big Operations meeting tomorrow.

4:20 pm
Return to office to see that Accounting training file is in my Inbox. Grab another cup of tea and begin reviewing. What kind of graphics can we use for this stuff? 

5:00 pm
Another look at e-mail. Ann from the STC Management SIG promises to get the candidate bios to me soon. Someone sends me a job opening for a tech writer. I forward it to several people.  

Open folder where I send all e-mails for top project. Click through to see if anything is relevant to me. Nada. Delete all. 

Another e-mail from the same project pops in with question: “User wants to know what reports are available to her in the application.” I write back, “See the online Help for details on all available reports.” I suppose it never occurred to them to check the Help. Bleeaaah!

Review schedule for tomorrow. Review what I didn’t do on my to-do list. Add a few more things I forgot about.  

Check out my sister’s blog. She’s in Japan visiting her daughter who’s teaching English north of Tokyo. 

6:00 pm
Pack up and leave. Nearly collide with one of the company’s head honchos on my way out of parking ramp. Rats.  

6:30 pm
Home!

Atlanta STC On-Site events

Like many STC chapters, we have members who work and live all over our metro area.Traffic is bad, gas is high, people are busy — all of these make it hard to attract members to the Atlanta chapter’s monthly programs. 

At the STC Summit in Philadelphia, we heard about the Chicago chapter’s successful lunch events. These get-togethers were held simultaneously at several locations throughout Chicago and surrounding suburbs. Chapter members enjoyed meeting up with each other at locations convenient to where they worked. 

We thought we’d try that approach this year. Then Rachel Peters offered to hold a program at her office in Marietta to demonstrate how they use a wiki at work. We set a date and worked out the arrangements for lunch and voilà! the STC On-Site event was born. Nearly 30 people have signed up for the August 14 program. You can read the details here.

If you live in the Atlanta area and would like to show your STC colleagues what you’re working on, we can hold an STC On-Site at your office, too.

Surviving the recession

Technical writers are a hardy bunch when it comes to finding work. At last week’s Atlanta STC Chapter meeting on “Surviving the Recession” the audience had as many suggestions as our speaker Frank Harper. 

Attendance was double this month over last, most likely because so many are worried about what’s ahead. But the picture wasn’t as bleak as you might think. Several people announced job openings, and Robert e-mailed me about two more the following day. 

I haven’t been searching for work lately, so Frank’s ideas were a good refresher. Everyone nodded and laughed when he said, “There’s no such thing as a permanent job.” He stressed that we need to take stock of our skills and find ways to acquire new ones — now, not later.  For those actively seeking work, he pointed to community- and church-sponsored career centers such as Career Quest at Catholic Church of St. Ann in Marietta. Others recommended the program run by the United Methodist Church in Roswell. 

Margaret told us about Indeed, a search engine for jobs. Here’s my search for technical writer positions in the state of Georgia. 138 listings! Woo hoo!

I like LinkedIn and use it when I’m searching for writers to hire. Other people mentioned Plaxo, so I went out and joined that, too.

One person said that you shouldn’t put your address on your resume because employers will disqualify you if you live too far from their office. I didn’t know that. . . . I still don’t know it. But others swore it was true. 

Frank is old school. He didn’t, for example, urge to start blogging to brand ourselves. He mentioned online networking, but didn’t give it much weight. Office 2007 seems to be one of his pet peeves. But overall it was good sound advice and a great opportunity to share tips with fellow tech writers. 

What job-hunting secrets are you willing to share with us?

A technical writer’s 10 birthday wishes

Yes, it’s my birthday.

Here’s what my cube looked like when I came in today.  Nice.

At my advanced age, I get 10 wishes instead of only one when I blow out the forest fire of candles on my cake. Here they come:

1. My cubicle is filled with birthday cards and gifts from all my SMEs, project managers, programmers, and upper management — including a small box of Swiss chocolates from the CEO “in appreciation of your wisdom and assistance to all the employees you’ve assisted and trained.”

2. My director gives approval to hire three full-time writers and one technical editor who will be devoted to revising our out-of -date style guide.

3. My content management system is not only granted funding, but can be implemented with the click of a mouse.

4. Company-wide memo encourages us to telecommute 4 out of 5 days a week to save gas and the ozone.

5. Second memo suggests we bring our dogs to the office on the 1 day we do come in.

6. Adobe taps me to participate in a technical communication focus group in Paris for 10 days next spring. (All expenses paid, of course.)

7. An IT project manager calls and says, ”Holly, I’m heading up a project to roll out XYZ software to the company in 2010. I want your team involved from the very beginning. Can you meet next week to discuss?”

8. My inbox is flooded with e-mails from end-users with messages like this, “I’ve been reading the ABC manual you wrote and I’m lovin’ it! Especially the troubleshooting section.” or “The new Help file rocks! I got stuck in the application and found the answer quickly in the online Help.”

9. My impossible-to-meet deadline is extended a month.

10. Atlanta STC membership doubles during my term as membership manager.

As Ringo Starr (another July birthday person) sang:
“I don’t ask for much; I only want some, and you know it don’t come easy.”

Upcoming events

Thursday, July 10, 5-8 pm
T-COMmons will hold a social event at the Delkwood Grill in Marietta. 
No charge. Raffle prize! 

T-COMmons is an online community that supports the programs at Southern Polytechnic State University’s (SPSU) English, Technical Communication, and Media Arts Department. It is open to anyone involved in technical communication and feels connected to SPSU’s learning and teaching objectives.

Tuesday, July 15, 6:15-8:15 pm
Atlanta STC Chapter presentation: “Surviving the Next Recession”
(Would that be the recession we are in right now?)
Speaker: Frank Harper
Location: Mirant

Also, Frank will give a brief demo of FrameMaker just before the formal program. 

Tuesday, August 19, 6:15-8:15pm
Atlanta STC Chapter presentation: “Six Laws of Fostering Team Member Accountability”
Speaker: Dana Brownlee
Location: Mirant

Fall 2008
Atlanta STC Chapter Competitions
Are you proud of a technical drawing, online help system, or user manual you worked on this year?
Find out what your STC peers think about your efforts!
Submit your work to the chapter competition.
Our chapter will exchange entries with another US chapter.
Winners are announced later this year and honored at a banquet in the spring.
Check the Atlanta chapter Web site for details coming soon.  

 

Come dine with me! (y otros como yo)

Dudes and dudettes,

If you haven’t made your reservations for the Atlanta Society for Technical Communication annual awards banquet, by golly, get crackin’!

This year we’ve ditched the rubber chicken at the Marriott in favor of (mama mia!) Maggiano’s at Perimeter Mall. 

Don’t tell me you have something better to do on April 22. (It’s a Tuesday, for Pete’s sake!) 

All the important people in tech comm in Atlanta will be there so you will want to come and rub shoulders with us. (No, I’m not going strapless.)

You can check out this year’s award-winning entries and pick up some pointers on how to improve your own work. Then we will joyfully toast the winners as they accept their awards. You’ll also meet and honor the STC activists who’ve worked hard all year to put together the monthly chapter presentations, run the competitions, solicit sponsors, reach out to students, organize community service events, and put together our successful Currents conference. They are all people worth knowing. 

If I don’t know you yet, please come and introduce yourself. I’ll be the one running around like a chicken with her head cut off so just tackle me at the appropriate moment. If I do know you, please come and tell me what you are doing these days. 

Mike Hughes is MC’ing and Mark Wallis is the official paparazzo. 

Allergic to gluten? No excuse! We can accommodate. 

I’m off to buy my frock. See you there!!!!

 

Atlanta STC blog is now live

Our beautiful new chapter newsletter is online!

Kudos to Robert Armstrong for the design and execution!

This will replace our tired old newsletter, which has been on life support for a couple of years. With the blog format, we can post news and information as it becomes available.

With the STC Summit scheduled for Atlanta in 2009, we now have a year and then some to perfect this communication tool.

Atlanta chapter members (and others!) who want to submit a posting, should contact Robert or Al Hood, our chapter president.

The death of the newsletter?

Our STC chapter has struggled for several years to consistently produce a newsletter for our members.

Editors come and go. When we do get a volunteer editor with a volunteer staff, a major effort is required to coordinate the activities: soliciting content, collecting it, editing it, soliciting ads, formatting the layout, proofreading the final version.

A lot of work. Funny thing is that during the gaps when we couldn’t produce a newsletter, there was no hue and cry from the chapter membership. That makes me wonder if the effort is worth it.

Some chapters have switched to a blog format in favor of a PDF version. The Austin Chapter has a nice one. And the Suncoast Chapter combined their Web site and newsletter into a blog.

Our chapter council is considering using a blog for the newsletter. Al Hood opened a discussion about this in his president’s blog.

I’m wondering whether we need a Web site AND a blog/newsletter. With the blog format, we can use tags to form the categories that already exist on our current site. So, for example, all the Currents information could be tagged “Currents Conference” and if you click there, they would appear. You also have the option on most blogs to set up static pages.

This would simplify our work greatly and make it easier to recruit volunteers.

Another benefit is more timely information.

Collaborating the old fashioned way

When a new director took over our group a few years ago, she assembled us for a getting-to-know-you session where she described her management style (open door, flexible, trusting), her expectations of us, and her long-term goals.

When she opened it up for Q & A, someone asked, ”What is your pet peeve?”

The answer came without hesitation: ”Endless e-mail chains.”

She decribed the all-too-familar scenario: Employees. who sit in the same building or even the same floor, arguing a question via e-mail, escalating the debate along the way by cc’ing more and more people, higher and higher up the org chart. Tension mounts as everyone copied on the exchange hovers over their Inbox awaiting the next salvo. Newcomers to the debate are forced to read the lengthy chain from the bottom up. Accusations and denials are made. The original thread gets muddled, nothing gets resolved. and little real work is done along the way.

“If you cannot resolve a problem in two rounds of e-mails. Get out of your chair, walk over to your coworker’s cube or office, and settle the dispute. At the very least pick up the phone and call them.”

With all the hype about wikis and virtual teams, are we losing sight of the benefits of face-to-face discussions with our fellow team members? I don’t know the statistics, but I would guess that many of us still primarily interact with coworkers located in the same physical plant. Yet how often do we take advantage of the opportunity to get together in the same room and talk things through.

This is what went through my mind last month when Mike Hughes described how his team at IBM Internet Security Systems talks through the architecture of their online help with the aid of an old-fashioned white board. They pull everyone into a room and examine the product, looking for the rough edges where users might turn to the online help for assistance. They scrutinize the content of the help file to determine what is useful and what is not.

Mike’s presentation was not about collaboration — his primary goal was to demonstrate the value of using “task clusters” in a help file as opposed to a TOC-driven structure. But his description of their collaborative efforts was an eye-opener for me.

My team has always worked on a wide variety of training and documentation deliverables. With rare exceptions, each writer works alone on a document or help file. We collaborate to solve problems, but not to validate our decisions on how to structure a document or approach a topic. As manager and editor, I review the final draft, but I can see the advantage of an earlier discussion. I’d like to experiment with this.

This kind of collaboration can be threatening if it isn’t handled well or if the presenter isn’t adequately prepared. But the benefits could be enormous. Every individual—even the most talented among us—has limitations and blind-spots. Another set of eyes or several sets, can make what seemed impossible, possible. As a team works through problems, they become more cohesive and build trust. Standards are set, innovation happens. The document or help file no longer “belongs” to the individual. It is a joint product.

I believe Mark Wallis (also from ISS)  is going to be discussing this more at next month’s meeting. The information isn’t posted on the chapter site yet, but it will be soon.