The development of user assistance is much more craft than mechanics. The skills we possess have a much greater influence on the effectiveness of our user assistance than the technologies that we use. In the survey, we asked the respondents to value the importance of 22 common skills employed by user assistance professionals in their daily work. The figure below shows the results for the top ten valued skills. The yellow portion of each bar represents the percentage of respondents giving a rating of "Invaluable"; the pink bar represents "Very Valuable."

Content Is King

Content development is what we recognize as our raison d’être. Five of the top ten skills are wordsmith functions. At the forefront is writing procedures, which had two-thirds of the respondents indicating it was "Invaluable." Writing reference information was next in line. Developmental editing, copy editing, and indexing also made the top ten. Success in our field relies heavily on our ability to craft words into a structure that communicates clearly to the user.

Project planning shared space at the top with 41% picking that as an "Invaluable" skill. In the survey, we narrowed the scope of this to "without management or supervisory responsibilities." We had a separate item for management and supervision skills and 22% marked that as an "Invaluable" skill. Quality assurance was rated "Invaluable" or "Very Valuable" by two-thirds of the respondents.

Coding HTML scored highly as did coding Windows Help. Coding CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) also slipped into the top ten most valued list.

Coding Skills

While content-related skills are the ones we value most highly, they are also skills that are the most highly evolved. Techniques for writing, editing, and indexing are well established and the rules don’t change with the frustrating regularity that we find with coding. Over the past ten years the number of markup languages and file formats has continued to grow and technical writers have had to work hard to keep up with the frenetic pace (see the figure below).

The value we place on coding increased from the previous year for all coding skills except programming. The biggest jump was in working with Cascading Style Sheets, which was up 40% over last year. The recent versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator browsers support the Cascading Style Sheet specifications and its use is rapidly growing.

While XML gets a lot of newsprint, only a quarter of us place a high value on it as a skill. Unlike HTML, competency with XML will be defined more by our understanding of what it is and how to use of it rather than requiring the ability to manually work with the underlying markup language.

Other Skills

For the other skills in the survey, here are the percentages of respondents who rated them as either "Invaluable" or "Very Valuable":

• Task analysis — 59%
• Usability testing — 56%
• Graphics development — 55%
• Management and supervision — 54%
• Web design — 47%
• Instructional design — 42%
• Localization — 35%
• CBT/WBT — 19%