My newest article, What content strategists do and earn: Findings from an exploratory survey of content strategy professionals, is currently available in the Proceedings of the 40th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication. In the article, Suzan Flanagan, Sheryl Ruszkiewicz, and I explore findings from a survey of content strategy professionals. Our findings indicate that content strategists are well-compensated professionals who make use of a wide variety of skill sets, from content auditing to SEO.
Why Should Technical Communication Care About Content Strategy?
Emerging fields like UX and content strategy have always been aligned with at least some of the aims of the field of technical communication. All these types of professionals focus on the communication of technical or specialized topics, for example. Content strategy, however, with its focus on writing, editing, and content management, aligns particularly well with more traditional roles like that of the technical writer. This means that technical communication programs can probably feed graduates into content strategy with some investment of course space.
What Do Content Strategists Do and Earn?
Ultimately, we found that content strategists use a very wide variety of skills in their daily work, skills that include:
- content auditing
- audience surveys
- usability studies
- creation of a controlled vocabulary
- and many more
Content strategists we surveyed also make a medium salary in the low six figures, which is commensurate with other well-payed roles such as technical writer and UX designer. Read the full paper below for more details. Utlimately, we suggest that content strategy is worth including in technical communication programs, but might create challenges for programs will little to know course space to dedicated to it.
Get the Full Article
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3513130.3558973 (permanent) (subscription required)
Cite The Article (APA)
Flanagan, S., Getto, G., & Ruszkiewicz, S. (2022). What content strategists do and earn: Findings from an exploratory survey of content strategy professionals. Proceedings of the 40th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication, 15–23.