I did an interview recently with Sarah O’Keefe from Scriptorium, where I talked about the current state of the technical writing job market. This comes as a result of my pouring over a decade’s worth of technical writer job posting data. This is now available as a podcast, and works as a good companion piece to my last blog post.
One of the questions that Sarah asked that I don’t think I’ve ever really talked about here on DITAWriter is what got me started with all of this data collection and analysis:
“One of the first things that made me think about starting to do actual research in this area was the claim thrown about very widely at the very beginning of DITA being disseminated… that it was the fastest growing XML standard out there. While I didn’t necessarily disagree with that, it was kind of like, yeah, but how do we know that? So I wanted to go and do some digging to see if I could actually find some evidence to go and ascertain if that was in fact the case or not. Arguably that answer… [was] yes.”
10+ years later and I am now able to answer other things about trends in the technical writer job market, the tools that we are using, and how other structured authoring standards are holding up.
So please, go check out the podcast.
