Offshoring Panic

This PDF report (and the lengthy discussion that follows) comes from the popular technical writers’ email list that I subscribe to and, rarely, actually read. Basically, it’s a study that lists a host of professions that are at risk of getting offshored (does a less-attractive verb exist?). You can read the summary list of professions here. Quick, look for your job!

I’m confident that offshoring will continue to grow. The costs savings obviously outweigh any downside in terms of decreased quality or increased administration. Fellow list member Bill Swallow says it better than I can:

This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. Run-of-the-mill tech writing is easily outsourced, as is most programming, testing, and the like. We’re the factory workers of the 21st century; if you can build a process out of a series of tasks and enforce standardization, you have yourself the means of automating much of what you do and can outsource the rest wherever you’d like. Don’t believe me? Look at the dynamic shift in how Tech Writers work and the tasks they generally perform over the past 50 years. We leapt from pencil-wielding authors to electron-spinning jack-of-all-trades in that time span. Change is inevitable, and money talks.

So, what’s a tech writer to do? I’m not really a tech writer anymore. I am occasionally, but these days I do far more work in marketing. Why? It’s more interesting. Also, marketing is much harder to outsource. Generally it requires cultural savvy, business knowledge and intimate awareness of market forces. These are difficult to acquire from India or China.

Generally, I advise technical writers to diversify as much as possible. In addition to their core writing and editing competencies, every tech writer should be able to:

• Build a decent-looking Web site
• Design professional-quality marketing collateral
• Write effective advertising/marketing content
• Meaningfully contribute to user-interface design (I’m not talking spelling mistakes here–read some books and apply what you learn)
• Review code, and have a general sense of what it does (this extends to being able to write an API guide based on that code)
• Understand and competently discuss your company’s business situation

In short, as a technical writer, you should be able to write, design, publish and manage all of the written materials for a company. That’s going to make you a lot more indispensable to an employer.