– Rajdeep Gupta
STC India Chapter offers technical communication professionals a platform to showcase talent and advance oneself in the field of technical communication. The 2010 STC India Career Day and Regional Conference organized at The Gateway Hotel, Bangalore on July 17, attracted tech writing professionals at all levels – from freshers to experienced.
The objective of the conference was to reach more people who haven’t heard of technical writing as a career from universities and colleges, and technical communicators who haven’t had much exposure to STC and its activities, to build the community, and share knowledge.
STC India would like to express her gratitude to the following sponsors for their unstinting support towards the STC India events. Here are a couple of the companies, in no particular order, who had made their presence at the conference:
* Technopoint
* Yorke Communications
* Tata Consultancy Services
* VMware
* TechWritingLabs
* NetApp
* Alcatel-Lucent
* Write Concept
We had 150 registrations for the conference and a record 110 people turned up for the event. The conference witnessed technical writers, senior authors, doc managers, cms pros, usability folks and more importantly freshers from various institutes. The event was video recorded and a part of the recording is available on You Tube.
Naveen D Cruz, Bangalore City Rep and the other STC India volunteers contributed significantly towards the success of the event. The conference started with Rajdeep welcoming the gathering and inviting STC President, Michelle Cherian to deliver the inaugural speech. In her speech, Michelle highlighted the various programs and events carried out by STC India throughout the year and started the buzz for the upcoming 12th STC India Annual Conference. Click here to visit the annual conference site.
The conference witnessed speakers deliver presentations on tools, design, processes, and challenges around the technical communication space. Parallely, at the STC India hiring junction, companies advertised job opportunities for technical writers, and collected resumes.
Hemanth was the first to deliver a presentation. Hemanth’ s solution documentation talk covered aspects like advantages of solution documents, contributors, process and challenges, and so on.
Next, Anu kept the audience engaged with her talk on “Relevance of Design for Technical Writers”. Based on her past experiences working on UX projects Anu outlined, discussed, and shared her views. Anu felt that there was a need for writers to learn about some aspects of design and usability to effectively contribute to the experience that the product offers.
Sebastian then took a leaf from Anu’ book and demonstrated how powerful it was to collaborate with SMEs for the quality of documentation.
Vasanth conducted a mock interview at the conference, which was received with aplomb. In his usual style of keeping the interviewee at toe, Vasanth grilled them on many subjects. The interviewees were from the job ranks- fresher, technical writer and senior technical writer. It was a unanimous decision of the council to award him as the best speaker for the conference.
The lunch was relished with great taste.
Prerran didn’t allow the delicious lunch to affect him and the audience a bit and proposed the Abracadabra solution. The solution in reality is a list of checklists that help writers ask the right questions, track their schedules, and avoid common risks associated with projects.
The STC India Webmaster Sridhar Machani was successful in convincing the technical communicators that they need to be familiar with building and managing web properties or risk extinction. His presentation showcased the development activities that he has been doing for the past few months for the India Chapter. Thank you Sridhar for your excellent work! Take a look here to know what I mean.
When Vinay Babu addresses a gathering, you better listen. He is one of the most accomplished speakers we have in the technical writing field today. Vinay, donning the coat of a tech writer turned manager, had tips and tricks for everyone who is in the technical writing profession and its management.
Prabhees shared his experiences on how to bag customer projects. He cited instances from a business analyst perspective on what are the qualities, constraints, aspects and so on to know for bagging customer projects.
STC India conducted a couple of contests on the day. Techwriting Labs sponsored the Essay Writing contest while NetApp sponsored the Creative Solutions contest. TCS sponsored the best speaker award while VMware sponsored the speakers’ gift vouchers. Technopoint ran a puzzle contest and gave away discounts for their training programs. The competitions Manager of STC India, Preran, dutifully took care of the competitions.
The conference provided the companies an opportunity to deliver an overview of their companies, functions, model, and their mode of operations. We hope to have more such presentations in the upcoming days. Subscribe to the STC India mailing list for details of the Chennai Regional Conference.
About the author:
Rajdeep Gupta is a writer and presently the Vice President and Sponsorship Manager for the STC India Chapter.
About the illustration:
Used with permission from Nirupama Singh.
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