The 2007 WritersUA Skills and Technologies Survey
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The development of user assistance is a blend of a wide variety of skills. Technical communication skills provide the foundation. They are supplemented by skills unique to the software development world. In this survey, we asked the respondents to value the importance of a number of skills commonly employed by user assistance professionals in their daily work. The figure below shows the top ten skills valued highly with a rating of "4" (Very Valuable) or "5" (Invaluable), the top two ratings on a five-point scale.
Content development was at the top of the list with writing procedures (88%) and writing reference information (80%) numbers one and three, respectively.
As for other aspects of content development, the value of Interviewing (78%) remains high. However, copy editing (61%) and developmental editing (59%) are only valued by just over half of respondents.
Experience with authoring tools (84%), in second place, is a key skill that is valued highly. The nature of working with a digital medium like software user assistance requires the use of a variety of tools. A plumber needs a pipe wrench and we need our authoring tools. Job listings frequently include a variety of tools as prerequisites, so it pays to keep your tool skills current and comprehensive.
Working as software developers also requires us to be knowledgeable about markup and programming languages. Coding HTML (61%) and Cascading Style Sheets (50%) are virtually requirements today. We place less emphasis on the importance of detailed knowledge of XML (37%), client-side scripting (20%), or other programming languages (15%).
Quality Assurance (56%) is valued by over half of the respondents as a way to ensure our user assistance meets the criteria expected by our organization and our customers.
Here are the percentages of respondents rating the rest of the skills choices as either "Very Valuable" or "Invaluable":
