What Tools and Skills Do Technical Communicators Need?

By Naomi Kleid

What tools do persons involved in hiring decisions want potential job candidates to know, and what skills do they want potential candidates to possess? This first article covering the results of the 2003 STC Carolina Chapter Employment and Salary Survey focuses on those questions. Please watch for additional survey results and analysis in future issues of the Carolina Communiqué and on the Carolina Chapter Website.

Between February 15, 2003 and March 28, 2003, 73 STC Carolina Chapter members completed the Employment and Salary Survey. Of those 73 members, 19 answered “Yes” to the question: “Are you responsible for or directly involved in hiring technical communicators at your company?” Of these 19, only six (31.6%) said that they required subject-matter knowledge from successful candidates. Knowledge requirements focused on computer programming and computer hardware. One respondent required knowledge of specific computer networking tools and one sought knowledge of business software.

Required Tool Knowledge: Knowledge of specific tools was required by 12 (63.2%) of the nineteen respondents. To better understand the tool requirements, the survey asked two questions. Both questions used a checklist of 18 tools that the survey-creation team considered important. (Respondents could write in additional tools; one respondent wrote in Visual Studio, while another added Fullshot.) The 18 tools are listed in the first column of the following table.



The first tool-related question asked respondents to rate each tool’s importance on a five-point scale, in which 1 meant “not important,” 2 meant “slightly important,” 3 meant “moderately important,” 4 meant “strongly important,” and 5 meant “vitally important.” Based on the respondents’ answers (see the column for “average importance rating”) the four most important tools for successful job candidates to know are:

• FrameMaker
• MS Word
• HTML
• Adobe Acrobat

All the other tools received importance ratings that, on average, were lower than 3.0, which meant “moderately important.”

The second tool-related question rated how widely known all eighteen tools were in this geographic area. Again a five-point scale was used, in which 1 meant “extremely difficult to find people with knowledge of this tool,” 2 meant “difficult to find,” 3 meant “neither difficult nor easy to find,” 4 meant “easy to find,” and 5 meant “extremely easy to find people with knowledge of this tool.” The following tools are most widely known in our Research Triangle Park area:

• MS Word
• HTML
• Adobe Acrobat
• RoboHelp
• FrameMaker
• DreamWeaver

All other tools were rated 3.00 or lower, which means that people with knowledge of those tools were not particularly easy to find in our area.

When we combine the two questions and focus on what tool knowledge is easy to find in this area and what tool knowledge is strongly or vitally important for a job candidate to have, the following four tools stand out:

• MS Word (3.18, 4.00)
• FrameMaker (3.9, 3.33)
• HTML (3.17, 3.60)
• Adobe Acrobat (3.7, 3.55)

Note that the first number in the parentheses is the average for the importance rating and the second number is the average for the easiness-to-find rating. The maximum rating on either scale is 5.0.

One interpretation of these findings is that, in our Research Triangle Park area, for a job candidate to be competitive, she or he must know four key tools: MS Word, FrameMaker, HTML, and Adobe Acrobat. The data suggest that hiring decision makers want potential candidates to know these tools, and many candidates have this knowledge.

Knowing tools that everyone else knows is one thing. Being able to bring something special to a competitive hiring situation is something else. People can bring knowledge of additional tools, and they can bring skills, as we shall see later. To find out what tools are considered special, at least in the sense that they are hard to find in the Research Triangle Park area, I looked at what tool knowledge is considered strongly and vitally important, yet hard to find. No tools fit those criteria. This suggests that it is easy to find people in this area with knowledge of all the important tools.

Next I looked for tools that are considered slightly or moderately important and less easy to find. To identify tools that are slightly or moderately important, I looked for tools that had an average rating of 2.0 or better and were rated just below the important tools we discussed earlier. Five tools were identified. They are listed below in descending order of importance:

• WebWorks Publisher
• Paint Shop Pro
• RoboHelp
• Photoshop
• XML

Of these tools, the ones that are hardest to find are listed below, with the least well-known tool appearing at the top.

• WebWorks Publisher
• XML
• Photoshop
• Paint Shop Pro
• RoboHelp

From a practical standpoint, knowledge of some of the tools above might differentiate potential candidates who also know the four important tools. Candidates who possess additional knowledge would bring something special to a hiring situation in which these tools are used.

Required Skills: Tools seem to be all important; they are prominently listed in job postings and they form the basis for discussions with job recruiters and placement professionals. However, professional technical communicators know that in a work situation, non-tool-related skills are also important. The survey respondents agreed. In fact, their agreement was nearly unanimous. Of the nineteen respondents who were involved in hiring technical communicators, eighteen (94.7%) said that they required writing or other professional skills from successful candidates. This response is much stronger than the 63.2% who said that they required knowledge of specific tools. Apparently tool knowledge alone does not address important hiring requirements — skills are extremely important.


To better understand the skill requirements of the persons who hire technical communicators, the survey asked two skill-related questions similar to the tool-related questions discussed above.



Both skill-related questions used a list of thirteen skills identified as potentially important by the survey-creation team. Many more skills could have been listed, but to limit the amount of time it would take the respondents to complete the survey, a write-in option for “Other” was provided. One person used this option to add “ability to learn new tools quickly.” The full list of skills is presented in the following table.

The first skill-related question asked respondents to rate the importance of each skill on the five-point scale from 1 (“not important”) to 5 (“vitally important”) that we discussed earlier. Based on the respondents’ answers (see the column for “average importance rating”), the most important skills are:

• Writing skills
• Skill in working with subject-matter experts (mostly computer experts)
• Interpersonal skills
• Technical aptitude
• Research skills
• Editing skills
• Proofreading skills
• Interviewing skills
• Troubleshooting skills

All other skills were rated lower than a 3.0, which means that, on average, they are considered “not important” or “slightly important.”

The second skill-related question rated the availability of persons with these skills in this geographic area. Again, the rating scale ranged from 1 (“extremely difficult to find people with this skill”) to 5 (“extremely easy to find people with this skill”). The following skills appear to be most widely available in our Research Triangle Park area:

• Proofreading skills
• Editing skills
• Research skills
• Production skills
• Interviewing skills

All other skills were rated lower, which suggests that they are either “difficult” or “extremely difficult” to find. The skill that appears to be the most difficult to find is Troubleshooting (2.73 / 5.00)

What about the four most important skills? How easy are they to find? The answer seems to be “not easy.” “Easy” would be a rating of 4.0 or higher, and the four most important skills each rated significantly lower than the criterion, based on statistical t tests, with a probability of error less than 0.005.

• Writing skills (2.88 / 5.00)
• Working with subject-matter experts (3.00 / 5.00)
• Interpersonal skills (2.88 / 5.00)
• Technical aptitude (2.81 / 5.00)

These findings help us identify important skills that need further development. The survey respondents also provided write-in comments about their skill needs. Two people said that other important traits that are hard to find include: having business savvy and being original thinkers and problem solvers. One person added: “The trick is to find the right combination of skills. That’s why tool usage and previous employment and a portfolio are all used in evaluating someone’s qualifications.” Other respondents emphasized experience and the candidate’s willingness to learn new skills, to fit in with the team, to demonstrate both technical and interpersonal skills, and to work hard.

Conclusions and Recommendations: Apparently in the Research Triangle Park area, it is easier to find potential job candidates with tool knowledge than relevant skills. I wonder whether tool knowledge is easier to find because it is easier to discuss — we have agreed-upon words and labels to facilitate communication — and tool knowledge may be easier to demonstrate, at some levels.

Skills are considered important by more of the hiring decision makers, but skills are not always mentioned in job position advertisements, and when they are mentioned they may be mentioned in a variety of ways, using a variety of sometimes vague terms. Skills may be harder to define.

Most of the skills on our survey list were complex. Many are harder to learn and take longer to master than many of the tools on the list. Skill, weaknesses may be more apparent than gaps in tool knowledge, and outstanding skill strengths may be more striking than outstanding tool knowledge. Basically, respondents may want to find as many job candidates as possible with exceptionally strong skills, but be satisfied when most candidates have merely adequate tool knowledge.

What are the practical implications of the survey findings? Perhaps hiring managers need to define the skills they seek in as much detail as they define the tools they need. Perhaps they need to test for these skills when they consider job applicants. Perhaps job applicants need to have the tools-knowledge that are so ubiquitously required, and provide writing samples and other documentation that show that they have the skills that are so necessary to succeed in our field.

More than half (57.9%) of the hiring decision makers said that if they could find candidates with the knowledge, skills, and tools they needed, they would hire them. This is an encouraging finding. The remaining 42.1% of the hiring decision makers would not hire such candidates. Why? For the most part, the answer was simple: they simply did not have any openings at the time they completed the survey. While our STC Carolina Chapter members wait for the current employment situation to improve, this may be an excellent time to acquire the knowledge, polish the skills, learn the tools, and prepare the résumés and portfolios that will help land jobs in the future.

Naomi Kleid, Ph.D. is President of InfoExact, Inc. She can be reached at nakleid at mindspring dot com.