A Case Study on Single Sourcing

A fellow technical writer Vinish Garg (enjoytechnicalwriting.com) got in touch recently and we started discussing about our projects. This was an opportunity to collaborate and he asked me to do a guest post for his blog. 

In my recent project, I use Single Sourcing for creating and maintaining documentation for our team. My guest post talks about justifying the use of single sourcing through this case study.

Read the whole blog post here:
http://enjoytechnicalwriting.com/2013/10/08/guest-post-justifying-single-sourcing-a-case-study/

Tips on finding technical writing work in Australia

A fellow tech writer (with some experience as a TW overseas) mailed me yesterday:

I have read your blog and your profile and I am very interested in your career development.
I am a new migrant in Australia and now I am looking for a technical writer position.
I am frustrated that I got few responses for my application. Can you give me some suggestions on how to hunt a technical writer job here in Australia?

Over the last few months, a number of other fellow tech writers (migrants and aspirants) have contacted me about sharing tips on finding technical writing work in Australia.

Australia's market for technical writers is relatively small compared to that in US, UK or Europe. As a result, many technical writers in Australia often know each other, either through forums/mailing lists or by working with each other.

Being in a position of having to go through the whole apply-interview-secure contract cycle every few months, I thought this was a good time to share my experiences (and a few things I’ve done) which has landed me some good tech writing work.

Note: I suppose these tips could apply to anyone looking for technical writing work in the world, but I've only stated my specific experiences here.

Network

Much as it sounds trivial and a part of common sense, it is important to build a network of other technical writers, recruitment agencies and as many people as you can who work in IT teams. Of late, I’ve discovered my chances of hearing or finding about tech writing work has vastly improved through the network. Often, I’ve heard about a role or potential opportunity because people in my network let me know if they hear anything. Agencies have often called me before the role has been officially published online through their channels. I reckon you stand a better chance if you have the first-mover advantage in such cases.

A lot of tech writers are actively using Linkedin and other popular media for getting in touch and sharing their stories. I’ve used Linkedin for communicating with other writers that I haven’t met before and they have all been very encouraging in their responses.

Approach

For 3 jobs out of the last 5 jobs, including my current one, I felt I stood a better chance at succeeding while presenting myself to the clients directly, rather than through recruiters. Of course, you can’t control how the jobs are advertised, but if you have a strong network, you may often hear about tech writing work, much before recruiters get into the picture.

I do not have anything recruiters. In fact, 2 of the other contracts I’ve successfully completed, was working with some excellent recruiters. My only gripe is against recruitment agencies that are so far removed from understanding what a technical writer does; it does not help your cause. This ignorance, I’ve felt, has often jeopardised my chances because the recruiter was unable to present my skills and what I brought to the role sufficiently.

Majority of the jobs are advertised via Seek, Careerone or Mycareer, but I’ve found indeed.com and Linkedin equally useful in looking for potential opportunities.

Customise

Again, common sense to have your Resume and/or Cover Letter customised to fit the requirements of the role. No point highlighting your application-specific experience, when the role demands more analytical, information gathering and business skills. In my opinion, a good technical writer should be able to use words effectively to customise a document according to the user needs. This is no different. If your Resume/Cover Letter can impress the client/customer, you stand a far better chance to at least getting an interview.

Demonstrate

I carry a combination of a CD (work samples) and hardcopy technical documentation to all my interviews. I used to lug around a laptop, but even the best technology fails at the most crucial of times, hence I switched to a medium that was not time and technology dependant. I can show a couple of work samples in a hard copy format, but also can choose to leave a CD (if the client wants) showing samples of my previous work. Most of these samples have been redacted for private and company-sensitive information, and often only contain snippets and random pages, but show enough of my skills with technical documentation.

Study the market

Even while I am working on a contract, I tend to keep an eye out on potential roles coming into the market. Not only does it keep me updated, it also helps to know the kind of roles and timing around when they get advertised. More often than not, I’ve seen similar kind of roles been advertised around the same time each year, definitely indicating a pattern of work. For example, around financial year, a lot of roles come up, mostly around documenting processes for organisations.

The last few years have been tough. I haven’t seen the same amount of technical writing work come into the market as last year or the year before that. A few recruiters that I spoke to recently confirmed this. A lot of the tech writing work is currently outsourced to India. Fellow tech writers from my network have commented on this, but the fact is, there simply do not seem to be enough new tech writing jobs coming through, not regularly anyway.

How are other technical writers looking for work? Have I missed anything that is important?Would love to hear your thoughts.

tcworld conference Bangalore 2013 - Summary

I attended my first ever conference in Bangalore, India – the tcworld conference, jointly hosted by tekom and TWIN. It was an amazing experience to chat to and interact with well over 350 technical writers, mostly from India, but also some amazing presenters from all over the world. I met many a fellow technical writer and it was interesting to hear about how quickly the technical communication profession is taking off in India. A large number of people I met worked for multinational IT giants such as Adobe, IBM, HP, Oracle, Cisco, but I also chatted with a few translators (another upcoming industry in India). Overall, an awesome experience!

A couple of days before the conference started; a 2-day nationwide strike was announced in India, which would have affected Day 1 of the conference. The organisers did a stellar job of arranging transport (chartered buses) for participants travelling from various parts of Bangalore and even organised backup plans for people flying in from other cities/overseas, in case the taxi organisations decided to join the strike. All this worked rather well and over 400 people attended the conference without any issues. 

This post provides a summary of the conference through some presentations I managed to find value out of, in the context of my current and future roles.

The State of the Tech Comm Industry - Scott Abel

The Content Wrangler kicked off proceedings with giving the audience a glimpse into the state of the Technical Communication industry via what tech writers (US and Europe primarily, but also a mix of other nations thrown in) answered in relation to a survey posted a few months back.

Amongst other things, a few interesting points coming out of the presentation are:

• A large number of TC teams have not yet adopted agile documentation methods, typically because of the organisation they are a part of and how the organisation looks at documentation.
• Advanced practices in developing documentation is driven largely by advent of configurable hardware/software products and consequently, TC teams need to be flexible with the approach to customer expectations.
• Organisations are still focused on the implementation rather than the strategy, thus missing out on crucial factors of planning for expected and unexpected changes.

The full presentation of this keynote address is available at:

http://www.slideshare.net/abelsp/the-state-of-the-technical-communication-industry-tcworld-india-2013-keynote-address

Smarter Education through videos and social media – Swathi Jain, IBM

In her presentation, Swathi demonstrated how it is possible to create videos that complement the traditional text documentation, based on the user learning preferences (visual, auditory, read/write, kinesthetic).

She argued that in some cases it is actually beneficial to have videos only to better suit the user requirements (For example, Procedural documentation, Installation Guides or Quick Start documentation). She backed up her arguments with videos she had prepared earlier and it clearly demonstrated the usability of this output mechanism.

According to her estimates, although videos may seem harder to produce initially, over time, creating videos takes the same amount of time as writing good textual content. She also showed how to popularise the videos effectively so that a large number of users benefit from this medium

DITA 1.2 – Tony Self

Tony Self, or Dr DITA as he is known in some parts of the world began his presentation with

Hi, my name is Tony Self and I am from Melbourne, the city from where Shane Warne is; although I am not sure whether that is a good or a bad thing.

Once the audience had warmed up to this, he proceeded to give us a quick demonstration of changes expected in DITA 1.2. DITA 1.2 has been around since 2010, but is only being implemented by a large number of organisations recently.

Although the presentation was probably more useful for someone who currently uses DITA 1.1 or an earlier version, it was clear enough to understand what was coming in the newer version.

Rethinking DITA – Tony Self

Tony Self started off Day 2 by getting us to first look at the legacy work practices around documentation and then leading into the exciting world of XML/DITA and the opportunities it offers to tech writers. He demonstrated the power of XML through a series of demonstrations and pointed us in the direction of a few common tools that he currently uses to leverage of the power of XML.

Information Mapping and DITA – Francis Declercq

I was interested in attending this presentation because I have been a strong supporter and user of the Information Mapping methodology and principles for the last 3 or so years. I was curious to know how IM tied in with DITA.

Definitions:

Information Mapping® is a structured writing method that helps writers analyse, organize, and present information based on the audience’s needs and the purpose of the information.

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is an XML‐based architecture for authoring, producing, and delivering information.

This is where the similarities and differences lay:

Similarities:

• DITA information types is based on IM principles
• Both define new basic units of information
• Both promote writing modular, reusable and topic-based content

Differences:

• DITA specifies a container
• IM specifies how to write content in that container

The next version of DITA (DITA 1.3) is supposed to have way more information types than it presently has, and this is to closely align with 6 key IM information types.

 

Social Media & Search Engine Friendly UA – Anindita Basu and Vidhya Kumar, IBM

The aim of this presentation was to provide information on how to create search engine friendly documentation and use the power of social media to promote this documentation.

The key messages from this presentation were:

• Search
  a. Optimise the help content by looking at keywords, content tags and introductory text
  b. Optimise the help architecture to establish the relative importance of pages and content
• ShareShare your content using internal (wiki pages) and external (Linkedin, Twitter etc) social media
• EngageExtend the reach of your content by involving both social media and search engines.
• MonitorGather statistics about the content and use web analytics tools to show ROI.