The Society for Technical Communication is an individual membership organization dedicated to advancing the arts and sciences of technical communication. It is the largest organization of its type in the world. Its 25,000 members include technical writers and editors, content developers, documentation specialists, technical illustrators, instructional designers, academics, information architects, usability and human factors professionals, visual designers, Web designers and developers, and translators - anyone whose work makes technical information available to those who need it.

The STC Toronto Chapter was founded in 1959 (then the Society of Technical Writers) and is the largest chapter in Canada.

About this Newsletter:

Special Feature
Will this Work get me a Real Job?
The Plight of the Technical Documentation Intern
by Ann L. Schwartz

"All my peers are authoring manuals."

"I seem to be working on a variety of projects but don't know how they will read in my resume."

"Is this task really related to technical documentation? I feel that I will have nothing substantial to show future employers."

"Look, I just want to get a decent paying job after I graduate so I can move out of my parents' basement."

Have you ever heard these laments from interns? I have, and then some. As a senior technical writer in a software company, one of my responsibilities is to interview, hire, and mentor interns for the documentation department. This is one of my more rewarding tasks as it allows me to interact with talented 'up and comers' as well as round out my more traditional documentation projects. In this piece, I thought I'd take a few moments to share an interesting story that you may want to share with others in the work place or classroom.

In our company, we try to match tasks to an intern's experience and areas of interest. Of course, in the real world, what an intern wants to do and what needs to be done are sometimes antithetical. This is usually the first step in what I like to call the 'sobering and excruciatingly painful phase' in the life of a junior writer. Ah yes, I remember my first day as a technical writer, bright eyed and bushy tailed ready to take on the documentation world with my idealistic hopes and dreams. That lasted until lunch. Interns are often thrown into whatever tasks are most pressing based on the release cycle and constantly changing company priorities.

Recently, my boss and I sat down with our intern du jour, upon her request, for a mid-term evaluation. Since her program only requires a final evaluation, I was impressed with her initiative and professionalism in her desire to get some early feedback. She was in a quandary. She'd been speaking with some of her school chums who said they were writing entire manuals for their employers. This made her stop and wonder if her work was impressive and worthwhile or if she was being left behind. Our intern has a good technical background so she really wanted to hone her writing skills.

We asked our intern: What projects are you presently working on? What do you do in a typical day? She outlined her responsibilities as follows:

• Work with a team on the company newsletter (a 30-40 page periodical that reaches over 2,600 customers and is distributed every eight weeks) to:

research and write three sections for each issue

review and edit articles

draft articles on new features and software

update databases, customer correspondence, and processes

format templates for both web and server distribution

test issues on multiple platforms (Mac OS X and Windows) and multiple web browsers

• Work on the product documentation to:

write and update documents for the online help library

learn and test new software and features

meet with developers

update graphics in documentation to coincide with documentation versions.

• Work on miscellaneous items to:

research, test, and write answers to customer queries

edit localization contracts and resize forms in multiple languages

review and summarize topics from a variety of engineering conferences

scribe at customer site visits.

So, at any given time on any given day our intern may write, design, research, and test items that span the spectrum from hard technical documents to marketing materials to customer support questions all within challenging timelines. She works on end user, administrator, and developer materials and assists in the design and format of same. She also meets with customers to discuss issues and objectives, has a hand in helping localizers, and takes part in that time honored tradition of interviewing SMEs. Finally, she improves existing documentation but also has the opportunity to create original work. You see her dilemma, right?

In the discussion that followed, we tried to impress upon our capable intern that, in this line of work, there are very few instances of being able to do one thing at a time. This is not an assembly line profession; only the truly versatile survive and prosper. The days of having just one project or task, or producing one manual from start to finish with no deviation, I believe, have gone by the wayside (actually, I think this is an urban myth). Most of us work on multiple projects concurrently, all usually at different stages. Let's face it, as technical writers how many hours do we really get to do heads down writing? Generally speaking, there is an 80/20 split; 80% brainstorming, architecting, and researching and 20% actual writing. The true value of work is not just in what you physically produce, but in all of the legwork it takes to complete the project. As someone who has to look at many resumes throughout the year, I love to see an intern who has done a variety of projects and tasks. Don't get me wrong, a 500 page original manual is also impressive, but come on, I don't know very many students, especially those with little or no experience, who do this during a work term.

The bottom line is that we tend to have too many projects and too few capable bodies to do them; I'm sure you've never experienced this phenomenon. We've had interns work on everything from updating product documentation, writing processes and FAQs, creating customer databases, and scribing at meetings to creating pretty pictures and testing. Hey, I even had one intern wash my car because he lost a bet (yes, it was all perfectly legal). The point I'm trying to make, and one that is rarely, if ever, emphasized in technical documentation programs is that ALL the work students, juniors, and even senior writers do is important. In the end, it all contributes to the viability and evolution of both the team and the deliverables we must produce on a daily basis.

Ann Schwartz (schwartz@firstclass.com) is a senior technical writer at Open Text Corp., FirstClass division.