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For that matter, I've never seen anyone fail to learn Interleaf, which
is supposed to be the most forbidding of all the high-end packages.
You just zip them off to Interleaf classes for four days, and they
have a nice working knowledge. The advanced classes are also very
useful, though personally I'd send someone to a Technical Illustration
class at the local community college as my first priority after
basic competence has been achieved.
Interleaf training is expensive, but you'll probably end up paying at
vastly more by insisting on hiring people with prior experience, through
a combination of lost work through the lengthy search process, higher
salary, and the statistical likelihood of ending up with someone less
well suited for the job.
(As to the latter point: Take the pool of candidates who are good
technical writers. Assume that a certain percentage are GREAT technical
writers. Now discard most of them because of some arbitrary criterion,
such as prior experience with a previous DTP system. The remaining pool
is smaller, and the odds that a great technical writer remains have
also been greatly reduced.)
-- Robert
--
Robert Plamondon, President/Managing Editor, High-Tech Technical Writing, Inc.
36475 Norton Creek Road * Blodgett * Oregon * 97326
robert -at- plamondon -dot- com * (541) 453-5841 * Fax: (541) 453-4139
