Training new hires in technical communication

After an arduous job search process that took place during my senior year in the Professional and Technical Writing program at Virginia Tech, I was recently hired here at Scriptorium. One thing I have learned is that matching candidates, especially new college graduates, and jobs in the world of technical communication can be difficult.

Technical communication is centered around the tools that you use to achieve more efficient writing and content management, like structured authoring and DITA. But many companies often have a hard time building up technical writing teams that have experience using these tools.

I am lucky, though, since I was introduced to DITA at Virginia Tech. Therefore, I am prepared and excited to join a content strategy consulting company that so heavily relies on DITA . Dr. Carlos Evia, the former director of the Professional and Technical Writing program at Virginia Tech, taught me everything I know about DITA and content management. Surprisingly, he is the only one in the country that teaches it at the collegiate level.

Dr. Evia is also studying the gap between requirements for entry level technical writing positions and undergraduate writing curricula. As he moves from the English to the Communications Department at Virginia Tech, he continues to try and bridge the silos that are communications and engineering. He knows that technical writing requires both communications skills and the technical knowledge of coding in DITA or XML.

The bottom line is that writers are not trained to code, and coders are not trained to communicate. When English majors finally decide on a practical writing career, they have a steep learning curve to assimilate into a world they never knew existed.

That means that if you are hiring entry-level employees, unless you are lucky enough to hire a student from Dr. Evia’s program, you will have to train your technical writers yourself from ground zero or poach someone trained by another company.

For now, I am continuing to acquaint myself with the nuances of DITA. Even with a solid foundation, for every tag I know, there is one I don’t. The team at Scriptorium has made every new obstacle seem a little smaller.