How is the role of technical communicators changing? What skills should we be focused on for future success?

With content coming from many sources and contributors throughout the community, technical communicators can feel threatened. For many years, we were the sole developers of content, carefully crafting each phrase to deliver information clearly and concisely. As social media expands, our skills for crafting the message may become less important and less valued.

However, we bring a critical skill to the table. We should move more into the architect and designer role for the content. Technical communicators can provide structure, organization, and examples for contributors to follow. With strong templates and samples, the quality of the new content improves. Many contributors use existing examples as a place to start, and they model their new content after existing content.

Technical communicators can also provide navigation to support multiple paths through the content. These navigation aides and SEO (search engine optimization) improvements make the content findable by the user (not just searchable).

Technologies like wikis, forums, and blogs invite community members to contribute to the content and become part of the conversation. Together, we share our knowledge and learn new approaches to solving issues. However, some of these technologies also have barriers, such as unique formatting codes in different types of wikis.

Some new technologies are coming to integrate these discussion platforms into more commonly-used products, such as email applications. For example, Google Wave offers the comfort level of email while integrating many wiki and instant message type features. This increased comfort level reduces barriers for contributors and may lead to more shared knowledge. Another example is the wide use of blog technologies, such as WordPress, to manage entire web sites. By using the simplified editing interface of WordPress, more people can contribute to the content on the web site (HTML and FTP knowledge is no longer needed).

Technical communicators need to move our focus up the chain to higher-level architecture and design tasks. We can focus on ensuring users can find and access the information they need. Our processes will also continue to change and we need to be flexible as we identify and develop newly required skills. For a summary of several other trends to consider, see Technical Communication Trends and Ideas.