Yesterday I gave a presentation called Tech Comm Trends: Providing Value as a Generalist in a Sea of Specialists on The Content Wrangler BrightTALK channel. The recording is embedded below. Read more »
Every year, when I re-examine my site analytics, I take the time to reflect on trends I’m seeing with traffic to my own site. Not necessarily industry trends, just trends about which topics are popular on my site. Based on these trends, I assess and re-evaluate some of my directions. This year, I found that the increase in traffic on my API documentation site (which accounts for 59% of my overall site traffic) suggests that more engineers are writing docs. This confirms my earlier predictions at the beginning of 2018 that specialization will drive more engineers to write API documentation, with technical writers playing more supporting editorial and publishing roles. Read more »
The 2017-2018 STC Salary Database was recently released, and the employment and salary levels for technical writers are looking really good — especially for some areas. 'San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara' (a Metropolitan Statistical Area or MSA) had a 34.5% increase in tech writer employment for 2017 and continued to be the highest-paying MSA for the fifth straight year in a row. In this post, I'll share a few highlights from the report. Read more »