FYI -- Some feedback from recruiters on the 2021 market

["Dr. Stanley Doherty" <stan@modularwriting.com>]

FYI -- Feedback from Boston-area recruiters on the 2021 job market	
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This month Boston DITA invited several tech writing recruiters to share with us their perceptions of trends in the market. One recruiter was able to join us in person; the others forwarded some data.

The recruiter feedback tracks with what we have been hearing in Boston DITA group meetings and in Adoption TC listening sessions for a while now. 

1. People joining the market:
   a. No graduates of academic technical writing programs are 
      entering the market. We are down to only one academic program 
	  in New England - from five or so 15 years ago.
   b. The people entering the market have experience and degrees 
      in software engineering, quality engineering, or Support. 
      They tend to be in their late-20's or early-30's and are 
      not expecting salaries comparable to the senior and principal 
      writers working with DITA.
   c. The people entering the market have little or no training
      in technical writing. 
	  
2. TECH WRITER MARKET: local hiring managers are looking for 
   the following skills:
   a. Markdown
   b. Github
   c. CICD - Continuous integration/deployment environments 
   d. Crowdsourcing 
   e. REST APIs
   f. Automation
   Docs as Code again. 
   
3. UXD WRITER MARKET: local hiring managers are looking for 
   the following skills:
   a. HTML5, JSON, JavaScript, and Markdown    
   b. Embedded user assistance (not CSH)   
   UXD teams are now developing a significant amount of content 
   apart form any tech pubs org. 
   
4. DITA MARKET: Of all the hiring managers with whom the 
   recruiters are working, perhaps half of them have been
   working in DITA at some point in the past several years. 
   Of those DITA shops, half are leaving DITA for MS Word,
   Docs as Code, or other DevOps frameworks. The managers 
   leaving DITA did so reluctantly. 
   
5. MEDICAL/PHARMA MARKET: Expanding quickly, but not interested
   in authoring solutions outside their regulatory database
   apps. People are hiring for their degrees in medicine or
   in clinical testing -- not writing. 
   
6. CONTRACT/PERM: Still looking 50/50.

7. CULTURE: Several managers reported that their teams were 
   experiencing culture clashes between the "old-timers"
   talking about "standards" and "best practices" in writing 
   and the "new kids" talking about crowdsourced conventions
   and the democratization of standards. UXD writers do
   not follow pubs standards; they follow UI interface 
   design standards. 
   
8. OFFSHORE HIRING: A small fraction of the job openings 
   expected in the first half of 2021 were for non-US 
   employees.  
   
It is important to note that this data was solicited from managers who were actively hiring in 2020/2021. There may be many DITA shops who are invisible to the recruiters because they are not currently hiring.