To find high-paying jobs in tech comm, many technical writers move to urban technology hubs because companies want their workers on site. Living in an urban tech hub usually involves high costs of living and the sacrifice of a more rural, suburban lifestyle. It’s unclear why the digital revolution doesn’t motivate more companies to welcome remote workers.
You can imagine my excitement when I saw that the top story in the STC’s Tech Comm Today newsletter was a curated article by none other than Tom Johnson of “I’d Rather Be Writing” himself, and it was an article inspired by one of my articles here! (Thanks, Tom!)
Tom takes the time to look at the STC Salary Database (which I have definitely tried to use to my advantage) to look a little deeper into the topic. In many ways, he comes to similar conclusions as I have, and the comments included (including one of my own talking about the database) is a great reflection of what’s going on in the tech comm field right now as far as opportunity availability.
After reading Tom’s post (and mine), what do you think? Is this a topic that should be pursued by the STC at-large to help companies become aware of the many tech comm resources globally that are available if they become more flexible? Include your comments below.
This was an interesting read, and actually made me think a little bit about my approach to job hunting. It used to be that I did job hunt like a guy–if I had most of the qualifications, then I applied. But in recent years, I haven’t done that so much. But I think that with the recession, it got to a point that so many people were out of work that employers could afford to put together a crazy wish list for employment qualifications, and they would find that person. Instead of 10 people applying to a job, 100 people would apply to the job, and more people could fill the majority of those qualifications than I could. So, I’m not sure it’s a “female thing” as much as being stigmatized that unless I have as many of the qualifications as possible, they won’t even look at me. I’ve actually been turned down for interviews because I didn’t know that ONE thing that they wanted, but otherwise qualified in spades (and I’m willing to bet, as I would tell many a recruiter, that the ONE thing is related to something similar I’ve done, and so I’m sure I’d learn that ONE thing in a matter of a couple weeks. But no deal.)
There are also other things working against me as well, namely being a woman, having a Latino (married) last name, and at this writing, quickly approaching being 50 years old. In the tech world, that seems to be three fairly big strikes against me when it shouldn’t be in this day and age, but there we are.
So what’s a gal to do? I’m thinking that perhaps I will start this approach again when the time comes and see what happens. I don’t think it will change things. The hiring process at large is a broken system of HR professionals or machines looking for keywords in resumes and cover letters, and if they don’t see them, you automatically get passed over. You might be overqualified for that position, but if you don’t have specifically XYZ, then you won’t even be considered in the first place. Applicants are treated as assets instead of being treated like people. I’ve often said, “Look, I am confident I could do this job, just let me interview with the hiring manager, and I’ll bet that even if I don’t get the job, then they’ll know that there’s someone who they can consider for another position later.” But no.
What do you think of this article–as a man, or as a woman? Include your comments below.
Liz Fraley of Single-Sourcing Solutions brought this to my attention through social media, and now I’m sharing with you.
As a person who has spent, oh, at least a decade (if not more) in either a CMS or an LMS (same thing, except it has a testing component in it and other database stuff attached to it), this is an interesting read. I’ve dealt with more haphazard, Frankenstein-like CMSs than I have with out-of-the box CMS products, and none of them are perfect and allow you to publish things exactly the way you want. Part of this is due to how the CMS is set up, and how the CSS files are set up. Based on those things, no amount of markup is going to change those overriding parameters.
One CMS, I’ve determined, that is generally vilified by the technical communication community is SharePoint. I’ve had to use it for at least two or three jobs in the past decade. And every time it was awful. Why? Microsoft, in all its infinite wisdom, has not created something that delivers what it says, or is intuitive in any way. Or, it could just be how the developers who set up each instance of SharePoint that I had to deal with did a poor job. For example, I’m using SharePoint for a current job right now. Theoretically, a user can copy something in Word, and paste it into SharePoint, and retain its formatting. It’s only partially true. If you need to tweak the formatting once it’s pasted, it gets ugly quickly. Now, to be dangerous, you can edit the HTML to clean up the code, but that is terrible and time consuming because between Word and SharePoint, a lot of unnecessary tags are added that aren’t needed. In the current version that I have to use for my job, a simple bullet point is never a bullet–it’s always an arrow instead. Not great when you have to create long lists of things. The big joke to me with another version was that it doesn’t like to format tables nicely. I would often copy the table into Dreamweaver, strip the extraneous code, or recode without anything crazy going on, and then copy the clean code back into SharePoint, and it would look beautiful. Now, I’m not a developer or programmer, but I know enough HTML to be dangerous and have been using some version of Dreamweaver for 20 years, so I know what I’m looking at. People thought I was some sort of coding genius to clean up their table for a SharePoint page, but it was really very elementary stuff. And forget about the back end–I can’t find where anything is, because it’s not intuitive in the set up at all.
The point is, this is where content strategist need to speak up to ensure that the tools they are using at a given company actually provides what the company needs. Content strategists and experienced content managers understand information structure, taxonomy and all that good stuff than a regular IT guy, because they are the ones in the trenches. Because so many CMS programs are bad, content strategists have to be creative with work-arounds. A common one, for example, is that if a video can’t be embedded on a page, you create an image that looks like a video with the player going, so the user will click it, and it will open up a separate window or browser tab to actually play the video. It shouldn’t have to be so hard! Some CMS systems get it right, or get it closer to being more intuitive. When I used AEM, it was very simple. Even WordPress or Drupal is more intuitive than some of the big enterprise/industrial CMSs out there.
What are your experiences? Do you agree with the author of the article? Include your comments below.
Sometimes we need to be able to speak up, rather than write. Scarlett Johanssen obviously knows how to do it. How come I’m not sure if I have the right skills?
One of the most important skills a technical communicator possesses is a true command of language, and the use of words in particular. We know that we excel at the written word, but how are we with speaking?
Sometimes our spoken word is just speaking our written words. That’s okay. But when we have to speak clearly, concisely, and cogently off-the-cuff–in the moment–how do we do? I’m sure that like most of the population, it’s a mix of those who are gifted verbally, those who are not, and the rest of the group falling in-between those two groups. As I thought about it, I decided tech comm’ers need to be in that gifted group, or work to be in that group. My problem is that as much as I try to have excellent oratorical skills, I’m not sure that I do.
I had some events recently, two incidents in particular that happened this past weekend, which caused me to doubt my rhetorical abilities. Last week, I was leading the STC-PMC conference, CONDUIT, and rather than prepare special notes, I decided to wing my introduction, and my introductions for the keynote speakers (I know both of them), and talked with a lot of people, and I was feeling pretty confident of how I was able to speak and set the tone of the conference.
A couple nights ago, one of the aforementioned incidents confirmed that confidence. I was at a dinner last night for the alumnae presenters and speakers for a conference I was attending over the weekend. One of the keynote speakers for the day was someone I’ve known since high school when she was a freshman and I was a junior (she was in my sister’s class). She is now famous as a celebrity skin care specialist. Anyhow, someone asked her if she was ready to speak, and she said, “Oh Gawd, no!”, and explained that she could do sound bites for television, video blogs, and magazines, but speeches were not her strength. She then posed the question, “Can anyone speak off the cuff like that?” Everyone at the table, who all attended the same school I did where rhetorical skills were a must to get through, all said no–except me. “Of course I can,” I replied. I was truly surprised that these women who had been trained to be “warrior women” couldn’t do that. It’s not that I felt superior, but I thought, geez, how did you not continue to develop that skill over the last 20 to 30 years as executives and professionals? I’m not even an executive and I could do that. Was that the power of tech comm and that command of language I talked about? Perhaps.
But what had happened earlier in the same evening has put things in doubt. I won’t go too deep into the specifics, but I had a verbal altercation which involved me speaking up against misbehaving children that I think I handled okay, but being a cognitive dimwit, I think I could’ve done better. I could hear other really well-spoken, quick-witted technical communicators that I know in my imagination later who I know would have come up with better responses that would have shut these people down more quickly. One of the people from the altercation who felt I was out of line called me rude and horrible towards children. Anyone who knows me knows I’m actually really great with children (I usually like kids better than adults), but in this case, children were being disruptive and disrespectful, and all I did was I say to the children in a stern but polite voice to stop screaming and running in this public place. I had already heard them ignore their dads three times to stop, and they didn’t, and it was getting worse. Long story, short, the kids did stop, there was a heated exchange, and the fathers and one mother tried to berate me. After the exchange was essentially over and my back was turned away from them, one of the fathers passed by me afterwards, and uttered a threat that if his buddies weren’t around, he’d beat me up. Of course, my first thought was “Bring it on!” since I have black belt in taekwondo and could probably smear him into the sidewalk. But, while I can’t remember my actual verbal response, I’m pretty sure it was something along the lines of “Really?” or “Seriously?” Afterwards, I was thinking about how his wife and kids must live with this awful person who would make a threat like that, and that his priority was that he’d be more embarrassed to punch a woman in front of his friends than his wife and small children. And all because he was not disciplining his kids. Seriously.
I was within my rights to say something, and I was bringing the mom/teacher tone with the kids. One of the kids eventually came back and apologized (I don’t know if it was at a parent’s prompting), and I kindly accepted the apology. I also apologized to the kid for yelling and said that I was frustrated, and as he was one of the older ones, asked if he could help the smaller kids understand. He was nice, and I was being nice back. I could be the responsible adult that their dads weren’t being. I had hoped that at least one of the parents heard what I had said in that I apologized as well.
But in the end, I’ve never gotten into a verbal altercation like that, let alone being threatened by someone. So, as much as thought I handled it as well as I could I could have, I was really agitated by the whole thing. Once I got home and tried sleeping, all I could think about was how I could have handled it better, or had that golden tongue to shut them down quicker. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, as they say, and since I couldn’t sleep from being so agitated from the incident, as all the wittier and more appropriate responses came to mind, making me angry at myself to not think of these responses at the time.
Perhaps it’s my autism at work. Maybe not. I don’t know. I’m also at an age where I feel that I don’t care what people think. I want to speak my mind whenever I can, and I bite my tongue more often than speak up. (I know some people who know me well would be surprised to read that). And yet, I do care. After discussing the incident further with my husband later, he felt this incident was an exception not the rule, because when the adrenaline is going, your mind will work very differently than when not under threat.
The next day, I listened to the keynote speaker, MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle, give a message that making an impact is more important than being famous. This is why I’m in technical communication. The daily work of tech comm’ers impacts lives. But what if we’re only good with written words and not spoken words? I fear this impacts our effectiveness and worth. So I’m at an impasse from recent events. Am I an effective rhetorical communicator or not?
In the end, I know there is power in words. As technical communicators, the words we choose have impact, whether they are written or spoken. If our written words are already strong, we need to ensure that our verbal words are equally as strong. Perhaps this is why I push myself to not always read off of written scripts or even to do presentations off of notes–to push myself to have more rhetorical power. Even as I wrote this, it occurred to me that as we write, we have a chance to edit and refine our words, but we don’t necessarily have that opportunity to do that when we speak. That makes it tricky.
How would you rate yourself and rate the importance of rhetoric in tech comm? Include your comments below.
This is how I view many cities. Is this really where all the tech comm work is? Photo by Lee Aik Soon on Unsplash
Being that I’m a person whose career is always seemingly in flux, I was listening to a past webinar that featured a few people I knew who were giving advice on how to stay current within the tech comm profession. While I found there were a few tips in there that were useful, I found that many of them were things that were things I had already tried, but hadn’t found true. Or, I’ve been doing them all along, and I’m not as far into my career as I want to be.
I’m sure after reading a lot of my posts about remote work, people obviously know what a big proponent I am of remote work–especially in the tech comm field. But I started thinking about additional aspects of it, and why it’s important that we try to keep working towards remote opportunities being available in this day and age: urbanization.
Now, just so you know, I’m currently contracted at a company–remotely–that has a vested interest in urbanization. One hundred and fifty years ago, people swarmed to the cities to find jobs–industrial jobs in factories, mostly–to support themselves and their families. Once the industrialization craze calmed down, as housing and cost-of-living costs went up in the cities, the move towards more suburban areas started. People could live outside the cities and still have really good jobs, or they lived in close enough proximity to get to a city without the hassles of city life. It was a winning situation. I’m finding that now, that is changing back to the industrial revolution thinking again, except there are differences this time.
This time, we are driven by the digital revolution–not the dot-com industry, exactly, but all the digital companies that run throughout the internet that provide information, development, and other resources in our lives. This sounds like it’d be a tech comm paradise–and it could be–if it wasn’t for one thing. Many of the opportunities are in the cities. Millennial are willingly flocking to the cities to hopefully provide manpower needed, but even they can have issues with living in the cities simply because of one thing: cost. I know I’ve read where you can’t even afford to live in the San Francisco Bay Area/Silicon Valley, even on the generous paychecks they dole out there, even if you live hours away. I think I just heard or read the other day that millennials are the first generation that won’t be able to buy cars or homes easily after a couple of years of working out of college. Baby boomers could because the cost of college, housing, and other “normal” living arrangements were still easily attainable. With each generation, it gets harder, and even if you are a Gen-Xer like myself, it doesn’t mean it’s easier necessarily.
I can’t speak for everyone, but as for myself, I find it very difficult to think that the only way for technical communicators to get jobs is to uproot themselves–and in some cases, entire families–for jobs in the cities, and that includes contract jobs. It’s bad enough that tech comm struggles to prove to industries that it has permanent value, and that technical communicators are not engineers, scientists, pharmacologists, executive MBAs, or computer programmers/developers who can write. The industry expectation is that you are one of those things, and you can write, instead of the other way around–a writer who can learn terminology and research, and can turn techno-babble into clear language for everyone else. That’s already a battle. But to say that those who do value tech comm are only found in the cities? That’s horrible.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Why is being in the city so important in the digital age? Is it because that’s where the financing is found? Is it because of corporate offices being in a city? I’m sure it’s yes, on both accounts. But when you really stop and think about it–why, in this digital age, are we having another flocking to urban areas? This doesn’t make sense to me. I think about where I live in Central New Jersey. When I was getting out of college, this area was the hot spot if you wanted to find a job. I moved from my parents’ house to the town I live in now to be closer to Princeton. Now…unless you are in finance, pharmaceuticals, or are an ace web programmer/developer (none of which are me), there’s nothing. All the appropriate jobs in are either in New York City or Philadelphia, both of which are at least an hour and a half commute in each direction. That would be three to four hours out of my day. Now, not to sound old, but that’s WAY too much of my time that could be my own. Taking public transportation doesn’t make it any better, really. It makes it more of a hassle, and still doesn’t allow me to own my time. I know people who do it, and I think they are crazy.
There are a LOT of talented people around the world. A lot of smart people around the world. I know technical communicators who, like myself, are at a loss as to what to do, because either they already live in a city and struggle to afford it, or like me, struggle to find something that’s either remote, or nearby so they can have a good quality of living for themselves and/or their family. Why should we sacrifice so much? It’s bad enough that the jobs are in the cities, but if the cost of living in those cities is making working at those jobs unattainable, isn’t the solution for companies to start either moving to the suburbs OR figuring out ways to encourage remote working? Perhaps that’s too logical.
The re-urbanization of society is not necessarily a good thing, especially considering this is the digital age, where we can put up hotspots and satellites and wi-fi towers anywhere we want within reason. Why aren’t companies taking advantage of this technology? If they like to think of themselves as global and inclusive, why are they limiting that global access and inclusivity only to their urban work sites?
As technical communicators, it should be a big part of our initiative to promote ourselves not only as people who add value to a company’s bottom line through documentation, UX, content strategy, and other skills we have, but that we are also able to work just about anywhere–including in our home offices–and still be effective at what we do. We can help our local economies by staying put and not contribute to the overcrowded cities and the rising costs there. Why would I want to try to get a studio apartment in San Francisco or Silicon Valley or New York City for USD$1-2 million when I can get a three-to-four bedroom house in a nice neighborhood, have some green space/a garden, a good school district for my child, for a fraction of that? Why should I have to sacrifice my time with my family and other obligations I have to my community by commuting four hours round trip everyday, and sacrificing my physical and mental well-being at the same time? Urbanization is not a solution, it’s more of a problem. Digitization should be allowing for more widespread resources, not confining them to one area that everyone must flock to.
If companies truly embrace global digitization and global opportunity, they shouldn’t focus solely on cities. They need to look EVERYWHERE, and provide opportunities everywhere.
To find high-paying jobs in tech comm, many technical writers move to urban technology hubs because companies want their workers on site. Living in an urban tech hub usually involves high costs of living and the sacrifice of a more rural, suburban lifestyle. It’s unclear why the digital revolution doesn’t motivate more companies to welcome remote workers.
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