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I just did some research into several Department of Commerce reports, which
identify as a major trend the tendency of small- to medium-sized IT
companies to "hire," rather than train skills. One report The Digital Work
Force: Building Infotech Skills at the Speed of Innovation, U.S. Department
of Commerce, Technology Administration, Office of Technology Policy, June
1999, links this tendency to the short span of product-to-market cycles,
which may be just a few months in today's accelerated markets.
If a tech writer has to learn or be trained in a new skill with a steep
learning curve, the reasoning goes that it makes more sense to hire talent
with the skill, rather than hiring the talent and training the skill. If it
takes a writer a month to get up to speed on a skill, this could be a third
of a product-to-market cycle.
I disagree with this reasoning on two counts:
* It is based on the view that tech writers are interchangeable
commodities. It's been our experience that writing talent, combined with the
right personality, is much rarer than tech writers with product skills, and
not interchangeable. A lot of people know FrameMaker, but fewer are good
writers.
* If the hiring company has a laundry list of product skills they
want, it unknowingly eliminates about 85% to 95% of available writers. This
can delay finding "the right person" far longer than hiring someone with
good personal qualities and experience and training them in the needed
product skills.
We point out these things to potential clients;however, this mind-set is
very strong now. It often is strong in formative companies that haven't
learned the ROI value of training, and most "New Economy" companies fall in
this category.
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