Soft Skills That Help In Technical Writing
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Soft skills are often overlooked in technical writing. People start seriously working on them only when a situation becomes dire. Like, when you realize that you are so bad at time management that this affects your career growth.
Being proactive with soft skills is awesome as they can make your career journey so much easier, prevent burnouts and boost performance.
In this article, we will talk about soft skills for technical writers and how to start developing them today.
Technical writers need to communicate a lot more than one would think. Doc teams can have a job-related conversation with any department in a company, but, of course, the main channel of communication leads to subject matter experts or SMEs for short.
Communication as a notion consists of many aspects. Let’s take a look at some of them:
These skills are actually pretty helpful in your everyday life, too.
This soft skill is not a must-have, but it helps technical writers to stay motivated at work. Not all topics you write about are exciting, but staying curious can get you through the most boring and hideous content! Also, curiosity is a true remedy against burnouts at work.
Some people are born curious, others can keep up! Here’s our advice:
This is a very important skill in our age of agile help authoring. And, since most types of technical documents are bound to product release dates, for the majority of technical writers, time management is the key soft skill.
Our perception of time can change due to many factors, but this isn’t something you can tell your manager if you always miss the deadline. One of the best ways to improve the time management skill is attending some training. For example, here’s one from Coursera – Work Smarter, Not Harder: Time Management for Personal & Professional Productivity, and also you can read useful tips on how to improve productivity on GanttPRO blog.
The rest depends on how much effort you are willing to make to implement these tools and techniques into your work process.
Creation of technical documents requires a lot of concentration. Luckily, there are many things that can help technical writers with that. Here’s what you can start doing right now to concentrate better:
That was our take on the most useful soft skills for technical writers. Of course, your list of must-have soft skills can differ. Different work processes and professional fields pose different challenges. We will be happy to hear what you think about the top-needed soft skills in technical writing, leave your ideas and share your experience in the comment section below.
Good luck with your technical writing!
ClickHelp Team
Author, host and deliver documentation across platforms and devices
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