Technical Communication Careers: Getting Started and Finding Your Niche (BYU Idaho Presentation)
Tomorrow I’m driving up to BYU Idaho to give a presentation titled “Technical Communication Careers: Getting Started and Finding Your Niche.” It’s part of their annual Pre-Professional Writing Conference for English and professional writing students. I like to go because I have an old colleague up there who teaches English (we spent 2 years in Egypt teaching at The American University in Cairo), and it’s always fun to visit with him.
Below are the “slides” for my presentation. I’m using WordPress rather than PowerPoint. You can actually click through the images just like you can with PowerPoint (once you are viewing the image details, click the image itself to move to the next one in the gallery). If you have any feedback about anything, let me know. I created these illustrations in Adobe Illustrator. I was actually going to insert them into PowerPoint, but I realized that when you view the PowerPoint show, it resizes the images and makes them a little blurry. Plus I’m weary of PowerPoint anyway and wanted to try something new.
Note: Several people have asked if they can use some of these images for their own slide presentations. Sure, feel free to do that. You can link back to my site with attribution if you want, but it’s not required.
Nice! What an awesome alternative!
wonderful presentation. One question: how about the technical writers in other fields than IT? Life sciences, pharmaceuticals, government, policies & procedures, etc. all need at least a reference. I understand that it’s important to tell students about careers that are likely to be there for them, so that certainly strengthens your decision to focus on IT. You do TechComm proud! Sure am glad you’re doing all that you do.
Love the presentation. I too would like to see something about tech writers in other fields. Also, I read somewhere that Information Architecture is the same thing as Information Design. Just throwing that out there.
You’re right. I completed omitted science and medical writers. I’ll have to include this point somewhere in the presentation.
Re IA = ID, I think they’re substantially different. It’s like saying Peter Morville and Edward Tufte basically say the same thing.
You’re weary of PowerPoint? I’m shocked, shocked to hear it.
I love this presentation. The only thing I’d change, other than a few minor comments that I made on the individual slides, is to clarify that some of the jobs you mentioned are entry-level and others are senior-level. For example, nobody is going to hire you as a content strategist or information architect right out of college. While it’s great to know about the various roles and aspire to the ones that interest you, you’ll still need to start in one of the less glamorous roles and work your way up.
Good point. You’re right about that. I feel like every time I present to college students about tech writing, though, the battle is always the same: they yawn and look down on tech writing as a mundane, boring career. I’m trying to open the possibilities of what could make the tech comm career more interesting and intellectually engaging.
The idea itself is really cool…I think it has definite possibilities. My only concern is that it’s not accessible…screen readers won’t be able to interpret the images and the color contrast doesn’t meet WCAG guidelines.
I’d love to see this fleshed out into a fully accessible version. Then it would be awesome
I didn’t know about the color contrast. When I exported from Illustrator, a lot of the gray looks more washed out than I anticipated. Maybe you could point me to a link about proper color contrast guidelines?
Re screenreaders, I solve this problem by recording my presentations, so that people who can’t read the slides will be able to listen to the presentation. Not many people do that.
Interesting to see this type of slide. There are also other in-the-browser type slides, if you can call them that.
From Opera: http://www.opera.com/browser/tutorials/operashow/center/
From W3C: http://www.w3.org/Talks/Tools/Slidy2/
Using those two tools might lead to improved accessibility: just the fact that you are using standards compliant material might give you the mindset to think about things like alt text, etc., which are missing here.
Accessibility doesn’t get a mention in your slideshow at all, and that is a shame. Some say it is a subset of usability, while others say the opposite. Wherever you stand, accessibility really needs a mention. It is too important to gloss over anymore. It is the same as saying IT is the only field for techcomm. I am in a medical device company just now. There are a completely different set of challenges in a manufacturing world, even though a lot is the same. That industry needs lots of techcomm people. Lots. As do so many other industries outside of IT.
Because there are a gazillion opportunities if one just puts on the old thinking cap, accessibility is one of those flexible, vital skills to have. For example, I know a tech writer who has won over 20 awards for excellence in techcomms, and who would not be able to view this blog post at all. She is blind and deaf. She could contribute to the debate here, but she is excluded due to accessibility issues. We have had enough exclusion over the years. We need inclusion or universal design now. Even content strategy is all about inclusion.
One last comment. Using a slide format like this is fun. What do you do when you don’t have an internet connection? Accessibility again. It really is ubiquitous.
Karen, thanks for helping me think more about accessibility. You’re right that I should have highlighted it more. I probably excluded it because I don’t focus much on accessibility in my current role. I’m wondering if PowerPoint is any more accessible than images? I do have short alt tags. Obviously I couldn’t put in entire paragraphs in a hover over. How would you make this more accessible? I could render the text as paragraphs in the comments below the image, but if you can’t see the image, then what’s the point of looking at the slide image in the first place? A text transcription wouldn’t make much sense.
Part of the problem with PowerPoint is that it traps your information in the PowerPoint format. Let’s say you create a custom illustration in PowerPoint. Now you want to resize it and put it on your blog. How do you do that, without just taking a screen capture of the illustration? I guess you could print the slide, but it’s more cumbersome than simply creating the illustration in a graphics program.
I think using WP as a slideshow tool has several benefits that other systems lack: you can accommodate comments under each individual slide. You can display the slides within the browser without distorting the images. All you have to do is upload the images, and then just rearrange them in the posts’ image gallery, so it’s incredibly easy (once you have the attachments.php file in your theme). People can be notified through RSS, they can share links to specific slides, and no one needs a PowerPoint viewer or other program to view the content.
Re Internet connections, I made sure I would have one where I’m presenting. Otherwise it would be a problem (but one I could solve by storing a local copy of WP on my machine and running it from there). Thanks again for your feedback.
Hi Tom
Accessibility is present in everyone’s job. It’s just not visible. You want your users to have a pleasant experience, as the saying goes, and implies accessibility. One of those users may have dyslexia so making something “screen reader friendly” benefits that person. (People with dyslexia are also screen reader users.) You need to know your audience (the ol’ techcomm mantra) because you cannot tell offhand whether someone has dyslexia or anything else considered a disability.
Alt text (not tags
) don’t belong in tool tips (the hovering stuff. And true, you cannot stuff an alt text with too much. Paragraphs would be lovely. Just because someone can’t see the images doesn’t mean they don’t want the message. You have a message. You want to communicate. Someone wants to receive that message. You need to ensure there are no barriers between you, the eager communicator, and the anxious recipient. A nice descriptive text is an alternate to the image. Maybe the illustration is created first. By writing about the image, you further stimulate your own creative processes. Your description can become quite a nice little masterpiece itself. You might even end up tweaking your illustration and making it even sharper in its message.
Taking these steps makes your otherwise fun idea of using WP reach a broader audience. You could even make an audio file for the images. You describe in audio what you otherwise could describe in the paragraph below the image. You won’t have the timing as with YouTube or PowerPoint. I don’t know if that means you need to make individual files for each slide. That is a mere technical and design hurdle. But yes, audio files are also an option.
Internet connections are the bane of many presenters, which I am sure you know just being an attendee at STC conferences! Or let’s say you go outside the US where you don’t have your ISP or a free wifi service. I mentioned that as a simple flag – be prepared. I’ll never forget a presenter who had an AV device crash on him in the middle of a presentation. Without missing a beat, he called out “AV” and waved his arm (calling the AV techie person up to the stage), and then continued with a marker and some transparent sheets on an “old-fashioned” overhead projector that was standing nearby. He worked smoothly with the projector in a way that seemed almost planned. That’s the be-prepared attitude in action!
The change in presentation tool is refreshing. I also admire the decrease in text density and increase in use of graphics compared to other tech comm presentations. We need more of this in our profession. We need to provide solutions that are quick, make efficient use of space, provide innovative approaches, and are easy to access.
Tom, you continue to impress me with all that you do.
Thank you.