Job function question

[Stuart Burnfield]

Craig said:
 > What about Documentation Specialist and Information Developer?
 > How does one know if one qualifies?

I hadn't heard of Documentation Specialist before, but I actually ticked 
it when renewing just then. It seems like not such a bad description for 
what I'm doing in my current contract--maintaining a SharePoint site, 
creating Word templates, reviewing or sprucing up internal procedures, 
and doing hefty diagrams in Visio, but not all that much writing.

I did see a job ad recently for a _Document_ Specialist that was clearly 
aimed at a sort of high-end filing clerk. This is probably the sort of 
thing Dori warned about.

Information Developer is a term used at IBM. My guess is that they 
wanted a broader term to cover staff who contribute to the development 
of so-called "information products" but don't do much or any technical 
writing. It's such a big place that they have people working full-time 
on quite specialised TW-related jobs--not just the obvious ones such as 
editing, illustration and indexing, but things like translation planning 
and "web site consistency cop". I was lucky to be able to do a little 
bit of everything, though not as much writing as I wanted. The 
developers on my project drafted all the end-user docs (I used to call 
myself the "technical rewriter").

Bill Swallow said:
 > The cold hard fact is that these and many other titles are thrown
 > around and used with no consistency across the profession...
 > Until the problems with title usage is fixed or until the STC
 > at least comes up with standards for such titles that it can at
 > least define and communicate out, I wouldn't pay it any mind.
 > Just check off whatever sounds good to you and leave it at that.
 > As far as I know, that info isn't actually used anyway.

I hope they're at least storing the results. If they ever do try to come 
up with a consistent set of job titles and descriptions, knowing what 
titles are in use would be a head start.

Stuart