Hard but Rewarding Work

The opportunity to help a client achieve their business objectives and goals related to the content that they produce is hard but rewarding work. Knowing that you are directly contributing to an organization’s success creates a sense of personal success.

As I have journeyed through my content strategies course, I have learned how to perform needs and gap analyses and to assess content provided by a client part of a group project. Developing the deliverables for the group project was challenging. However, my teammate and I are confident that we provided valuable insight into the state of their content. That is the reward for our hard work on the project. Now we are moving on to the individual project phase of developing a content strategy roadmap expanding on the work we did as a group.

Leveraging Content for Profitability

One of the recurring themes in my content strategies course is that content is a business asset for organizations today. Properly leveraging content contributes directly to an organization’s profitability. Yet, as I understand it from course materials, there is a disconnect between the content an organization produces and how it is a business asset. There is a major focus on marketing content and less focus on other content such as user guides, customer support documentation, product tutorials and the like. This is understandable given that the connection between marketing specific content and profitability is obvious to decision-makers; marketing content by design draws in customers to buy products and/or services. This is where a content strategist comes in.

In my content strategies course, we discussed content strategy as a specialized form of management consulting. I understand this to mean that where management consultants analyze business practices to provide a path forward for increased productivity at an organization, content strategists analyze an organization’s content to provide a path forward to leverage content for increased profitability.

Management Consultants at Work

My personal experience with management consulting involves one of my recent employers. To resolve productivity issues, a management consulting firm was hired to evaluate our processes and provide a roadmap to close the gap between where our productivity was and where our leadership wanted it to be. For months consultants from this firm followed first level leadership (my direct supervisor, associate managers, and managers) to identify gaps in knowledge, best practices, and processes. At the level I was at, I didn’t have access to their analyses or recommendations. However, I experienced changes that were made as a result. Likewise, I’m unaware if a content audit of was part of their analysis, but I doubt that it was.

Based on that experience, and taking content strategies, I see parallels between management consulting and content strategy. Each field works toward the same goal, increased profitability for their client, but take different approaches to achieve that goal. Taking content strategies provided a new perspective for what the management consultants were doing and how I can do the same by specializing in content strategy.

Tools of the Trade

As with any industry there are tools and skills needed to do the job of a technical communicator. Over time these tools and skills change. For example, AI is becoming a prominent aspiration for organizations that want to streamline and automate their processes. I found it fascinating that ChatGPT, though still in the research trial phase, looks to be a promising tool to assist technical communicators in their work, especially as it applies to research and drafting.

Even though research and draft writing could be automated using AI platforms such as ChatGPT, technical communicators would still have to vet the results of research and draft writing. At the moment the role of technical communicators doesn’t appear to be fully automatable, but wise professionals will stay abreast of technological advancements and work to develop the necessary skills to stay relevant in the field and avoid obsoletion. The moral technical communicators adapt and overcome just like the US Marines.

Looking Forward

As I work on a content strategy roadmap for my client’s content, I realize that I am leveraging previous experience and new knowledge on the way to a new career. Likewise, I am still only at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to content strategy. As such, I am willing and eager to learn more about this field and have tentative plans to pursue content strategy as a career. There is still so much to discover about this burgeoning field of technical communication. The fact that there is so much still to discover makes content strategy a viable career path for technical communicators. From my perspective the fact that this is still a relatively new field positions me to be a pioneer in content strategy as I look forward to starting my career as a technical communicator.