Tech Writing a Growing Field?

[Gene Kim-Eng]

In the industries where I do most of my work (aircraft
and other manufacturing), the trend I think I'm seeing
is back in the direction things were in during my
engineering years, greater emphasis on communications
skills in developers and smaller staffs of technical
writers (with a greater emphasis on technical background
and experience).organizing and managing input from
developers, with periodic temporary hiring of
nontechnical writers and editors during crunch times.

If you're a current or former engineer who can write,
a writer with a secondary technical background or
a writer with a nontechnical background but years of
experience documenting a particular industry or
technology, IMO prospects for future growth look
pretty good, but I think the dot.com days of hiring
people with unspecialized writing skills and spoon-
feeding them technical input are unlikely to return.
What that means as far as "our profession" growing
or not I couldn't say, because I don't know how the
current "numbers" divide up between these categories.

Gene Kim-Eng


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Nancy Allison" <maker at verizon.net>

> And I'm wondering if anyone knows if that is still the case. It was certainly so before the crash of 2000 and the advent of 
> outsourcing. (My last contract ended when the writing was sent to CANADA, and the remaining US writers turned into 
> managers-of-outsourced-documents rather than tech writers.)
>
> Is tech writing still seen as a desirable profession, and are our numbers still growing in the US?