In over 30 years of working as a technical writer, I've seen many changes in the role. Some of these were technological (desktop publishing, XML, the internet), while others involved learning how to deal with new methodologies (structured authoring, DITA, content management).
And the changes keep coming. This article summarizes some of them and points out how technical communicators have the skills to take on a variety of roles in the new content ecology. For example:
- Content Operations: Tools, Workflows, Management
- Content Engineering: Structure, Platform, Semantics
- Content Strategy: Audience, Messaging, Segmentation, Calendar, and Audit
- Analyst: BA, Requirements
- Content Design: Conversational Design, Information Architecture, User Experience
- Product: Sales Engineer, Product Manager, Product Marketing and Product Training
- New Forms of Writing: Microcopy, Linked Data and Semantic Writing, Conversational Dialogues
- Artificial Intelligence (AI): Natural Language Processing, Natural-Language Generation, and Machine Learning.
There's a fair bit of corporate-speak to wade through in the article but it does make some good points. I especially like it that they consider structured authoring and object-oriented thinking as key skills.
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