Technical Communicator Skills Survey—a Report on the Results

Here at last is my report on the responses to the survey carried out through Technical Communicator Skills Form, designed to go with the document Mapping the Field of Technical Writing. The survey was carried out during the period 18 September to 15 October 2007, and drew responses from 103 people. I reported on the survey at the ASTC (NSW) New Horizons conference in Sydney (26–27 October 2007).

I apologise that the report is appearing much later than I originally said it would. This work is carried out in my own time, without any financial support, and so had to compete with the demands of the rest of my life.

The form asked technical communicators about the skills they used in their work, to get some idea of the relative importance of these skills and work out how they could be used to ‘map out’ the territory occupied by the profession. To see exactly what questions were asked, have a look at the form itself. Because the survey’s now closed, the Submit button’s disabled—you can’t submit it any more—but the form still looks exactly as it did.

About the charts

The responses are presented in a series of charts, originally generated in an Excel workbook. They’re grouped into two main areas.

The first group of charts are the demographic charts, based on respondents’ answers to questions like: how old are you?, where do you live?, are you male or female? For each question there is a pie-chart, showing the distribution of responses for that question.

The second, and most important, group comprises the score charts. Each respondent was asked to assign a numerical score in the range 0 to 4 to each skill, indicating the relative importance of that skill to his or her work. The charts show the responses grouped under the headings used in the form. For each heading there are two charts: you can select either a chart showing just the average score assigned to each skill in that group (the ‘Averages’ option) or a composite chart showing what percentage of respondents assigned each score for the skills in that group—that is, what percentage assigned 1, what percentage assigned 2, and so on (the ‘All scores’ option).

If you want further clarification of what the charts mean, I’ve also provided links to an Explanation page.

Respondents’ Feedback

I was planning to include another page listing some of the feedback and comments I received, but if I don’t get this up now everyone will give up on me! I’ll try to get that up later.

A note on Excel

Since many people don’t appreciate just what Excel is capable of, it may be worth pointing out a few things about the Excel workbook I used to generate these charts and analyse the responses. (In addition to being a technical writer, I also work from time to time as an Excel consultant.) First of all, although this report displays many score charts, the workbook actually contains just one ‘Averages’ chart and one ‘All scores’ chart. In the workbook, if you want to see the display appropriate to a particular heading in the original workbook, you select that heading in a drop-down control, and the chart then looks for the corresponding data and adjusts its display accordingly. So while this report contains a separate graphic for each of these score charts, in fact I created all of them from the same two sheets in my workbook. (In fact, with a bit more work I probably could even have made these two sheets into one!)

The same basic idea of using on-screen controls to adjust the data displayed in a chart can also be used to filter the data and display only results for to a part of the sample—for instance, you can display results from just female respondents or from just respondents in a particular state. (I demonstrated this aspect briefly in my talk at the Sydney conference.)

Howard Silcock ( me)