From the President

May 2019

Kia ora!

Lately I’ve been reading a bit about the future of work. I stumbled across this website “Will robots take my job?” which worryingly predicts that Technical Writers have an 89% chance of being replaced by AI and robots.

However, reading the site’s description of Technical Writers I didn’t see it bear much resemblance to my experience of what a technical communicator does, at least here in New Zealand. Weirdly, editors only have a 6% chance, graphic designers 8% and instructional coordinators is 0.4%.

Audiologists are sitting at the lowest risk of robot takeover at 0.33 % so if you fancy a career change maybe it’s time to get studying (you’ll need at least four years to get qualified!)

I’m not sure what conclusions to draw from this very unscientific research but I’ll let you know if I figure out anything useful or relevant!

Upskill and feel confident

Last month I attended Patrick Hofmann’s “Pictures with Patrick” workshop in Christchurch. Thanks to Steve Moss for arranging Patrick to come back over, Emma and Ian for the venue, and of course Patrick for the fabulous, inspiring, and useful workshop. It was also really nice to meet a few new faces at this workshop and to connect further over dinner afterwards (thanks to Emma for organising this).

In June, our own Board member Peter Nock is following on from his Excel webinar with an intermediate-level all day workshop. We’re running this in Auckland, Christchurch, AND Wellington this time, so please share widely with your networks. While Excel is not a standard authoring tool (well I hope not) for technical communicators I think just about all of us need to use it for our work or home life, so it makes sense to upskill and feel confident with this tool. Remember that you can see our upcoming events on the homepage of the TechCommNZ website and you can read all the previous newsletters from the link in the Resources menu.

If you have a spare minute, please take some time to check out the conference website. You can read about our presenters and what they’ll be talking about. We have a great selection of ‘old favourites’ as well as some new talent this year.

Socialise!

Finally, I’ve really enjoyed seeing our Slack channel start to get busier with a lot more sign-ups and a bit of light-hearted discussion. I’m looking forward to reading some great discussion (and jokes). Remember you can post job vacancies or wanted ads here too.

Hei konā mai

Meredith