Firehead

I am the president of the Transalpine chapter of the STC. We are orgnanising Content Strategy 2010 jointly with the France chapter (who are hosting it in Paris). Violaine Truck, a young, vibrant member of the France chapter’s leadership, entered a contest where she was asked to express what she thinks are the most important skills a technical communicator needs for the future. Now, you don’t get a lot of poetry in our field, so I was delighted with her entry:

In the future, technical communicators will need to adopt an ATMO attitude in order to:

- Adapt quickly – Technologies are moving fast and need fast learners who can practice them quickly. Fortunately, new products are ergonomically improving as well so it’s becoming quicker and easier to adapt technology speaking.

- Think broadly – Adapting to technologies is one thing, adapting to new human behaviours is another thing. New social practices are reflected through social media.

- Mutate – Globalization means global mutation and cross-cultural assimilation.  The results will be multilingual, multicultural flexible human beings.

- Optimize time – Time barriers set by rigid time scheduling will soon be a thing of the past… Technical communicators will know how to get rid of time constraints by optimizing the way they accomplish their work.

Next, we’ll all be asked to write in iambic pentameter for online helps!