Achieving balance, redux

22 Feb

Posted by admin as opinion, skills, training

Last week, we wrote some thoughts about Ivan Walsh’s post “Who Makes The Most Money – Technical Writers with Strong Language or Deep Technical Skills?. A comment from Kai Weber got us thinking about this in a slightly different way.

From Kai’s comment:

As long as you’re personally not quite there yet, the second best thing is to balance the two skills within your team of writers. You’ll often know when you come up short in one area, and writers with complementary skills can help you out quickly with the kind of advice that helps you proceed.

Even if you’re constantly learning, you’ll never know everything or be able to do everything. There’s no shame in that. As Kai mentioned in his comment, try to maintain a balance of skills and expertise within your team. Defer to others on your team who have skills and knowledge that you don’t, or who have more than you do. Use situations like that as an opportunity to learn.

One important thing to remember is that you’ll probably never achieve a perfect balance between your technical and your writing skills. One set of skills will always be dominant. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, though. For us, one of the biggest attractions of tech comm is learning new skills and stretching ourselves.

What if it’s just you?

Being the lone writer can be tough — we’ve both been there. You’re expected to the the Jack/Jill of all technical writing trades. And, sometimes, it can be overwhelming.

That’s when what we term situational knowledge — the knowledge you need for the duration of a project or release — comes into play. Pick up enough skills and knowledge to be dangerous, then move on. If you need those skills or that knowledge again, you can always do a reactivation.

To be honest, you’re never really alone. You have developers, product managers, and QA people whose expertise you can tap.

What about calling on the skills and knowledge of other technical writers? Thanks forums, blogs, knowledge bases, email, instant messaging, and the like you have almost instant access to other technical writers. When we were lone writers, we’d often email or IM each other or other writers we know for help. It saved us a lot of time, a lot of effort, and a lot of frustration.

Thoughts? As always, feel free to leave a comment.

Photo credit: white bird from Photoxpress