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In this thread almost everyone has made an assumption that I believe is erroneous. The assumption is that a list of skills that apply to tech writing is a checklist to see if an individual measures up.
Under this interpretation, if Mary has skills A, B, D, E, and H, but doesn't have skills C, F, and G, she will be evaluated lower or paid less or have less job security than Joan, who has all of the skills A through H.
In these paranoid (not to mention narcissistic) times, I can see how people would fall into that way of thinking. And it certainly behooves anyone distributing a questionnaire about skill sets to managers to clarify the intent.
Absent evidence to the contrary, though, I think that the questionnaire has a more benign purpose, as I outlined earlier. The purpose, in a structured project planning environment, is to assemble a team that can produce the needed deliverables. Period. It is not a tool for evaluating individuals. So the granularity can be much larger than others are proposing. Can you produce online Help for an application? Great. I need someone who can produce online Help. Don't bother me with the details.
Of course, I could be wrong about all of this ... ;-)
>
>Thanks for the clarification, Dick. My point was that in *some* of the
>companies I've worked for, "production skills" translated to manufacturing
>environments. So in putting together a matrix that HR types, among others,
>would be consulting, I'd be very careful about using that specific term. In
>those cases, "production"=lower, non-salaried wages.Perhaps I, too, was not
>as clear as I could have been.
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