Re: Linked-In: Your Skills' Desirability Is Cratering Year Over Year

Subject: Re: Linked-In: Your Skills' Desirability Is Cratering Year Over Year
From: Mark Giffin <mgiffin -at- earthlink -dot- net>
Date: Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:36:40 -0800

I notice the skills list glaringly did not include such late-model tech writer items as DITA, wikis, content management systems, and information architecture. So I think the list is suspect in some of the things it might imply for the tech comm industry.

That XML skills are down does not really surprise me, because "XML skills" are not something I usually see in ads for tech writers these days. My impression is that DITA has won the XML format battle, and general XML skills by themselves would be less in demand. All the DITA consultants I know are busy these days, including me. XML skills are included in that.

XML is no longer cool in much of the programming world. In web services and websites, it is usually replaced by the JSON format, which has many advantages on the web (mainly it's simpler, requires fewer bytes over the network, and is natively readable by JavaScript). But the tech comm world is not the programming world. Even the main popularizer of JSON, Douglas Crockford, says that JSON is not as good as XML for documents, which is what tech writers mainly use it for.

Weirdly, the only thing in the list that is up is "Writing: 1.4 M, +5%". I wonder what that means?

Mark Giffin

/Technical writing: 112 K users, -4%/
/Documentation: 1 M, -7%/
/Adobe Acrobat: 93.6 K, -10%/
/Writing: 1.4 M, + 5%/
/Word: 854 K, -7%/
/HTML: 639 K, -1%/
/XML: 369K, -9%/
/FrameMaker: 12.4 K, -16%/
/Editing: 778 K, 0%/
/Online Help: 16.9 K, -15%

/
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References:
Re: Re: Linked-In: Your Skills' Desirability Is Cratering Year Over Year: From: Nancy Allison
Re: Linked-In: Your Skills' Desirability Is Cratering Year Over Year: From: Laura Lemay
Re: Linked-In: Your Skills' Desirability Is Cratering Year Over Year: From: Roberta Hennessey

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