A Day in the Life: Personas of Professional Communicators at Work

Abstract

This article uses personas to illustrate the range of technical communication knowledge work developed through its practitioners—to articulate the functions, characteristics, traits, skills, and workplace styles of positions someone in the field might pursue. Recent research has provided valuable data about the expanding and evolving skill sets of the technical/professional communicator. We build on that by triangulating the data from an analysis of job postings, a survey of technical communicators, and interviews and embedded observations of practitioners to develop personas of technical/professional communicators on the job. The personas can help students, programs, and practitioners understand and navigate the many types of roles that are available in the field.

Keywords

workplace research jobs competencies personas careers

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Barnum

(2010). Usability testing essentials. Bulington, MA: Elsevier.

Blythe

Lauer

Curran

(2014). Professional & technical communication in a Web 2.0 world: A report on a nationwide survey. Technical Communication Quarterly, 23, 265–287.

Brumberger, E. & Lauer, C. (2015). The evolution of technical communication: An analysis of industry job postings. Technical Communication, 62(4), 224--243.

Brumberger, E. & Lauer, C. (2017). International faces of technical communication: An analysis of job postings in three markets. Technical Communication, 64(4), 310--327.

Chapman, C., Love, E., Milham, R., ElRif, P., & Alford, J. (2008). Quantitative evaluation of personas as information. In Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 52nd Annual Meeting (pp. 1107--1111). Santa Monica, CA: Human Factors & Ergonomics Society.

Cooper

(1999). The inmates are running the asylum: Why high-tech products drive us crazy and how to restore the sanity. Indianapolis, IN: Sams Publishing.

Ford

Zimmerman

Bird

Nagappan

(2017). Characterizing software engineering work with personas based on knowledge worker actions. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM) (pp. 1–10). New York, NY: ACM.

Getto

Moore

(2017). Mapping personas: Designing UX relationships for an online coastal atlas. Computers and Composition, 43, 15–34.

Getto

St. Amant

(2015). Designing globally, working locally: Using personas to develop online communication products for international users. Communication Design Quarterly, 3(1), 24–46.

10.

Harley

(2015). Personas make users memorable for product team members. Retrieved from https://www.nngroup.com/articles/persona/

11.

Henschel

Meloncon

(2014). Of horsemen and layered literacies: Assessment instruments for aligning technical and professional communication undergraduate curricula with professional expectations. Programmatic Perspectives, 6(1), 3–26.

12.

Holton

(2007). The coding process and its challenges. In Bryant

Charmaz

(Eds.), The SAGE handbook of grounded theory (pp. 265–289). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

13.

Huckin

(2004). Content analysis: What texts talk about. In Bazerman

(Ed.), What writing does and how it does it: An introduction to analyzing texts and textual practices (pp. 13–32). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

14.

Lanier

(2009). Analysis of the skills called for by technical communication employers in recruitment postings. Technical Communication, 56(1), 51–61.

15.

Lauer, C. & Brumberger, E. (2016). Technical communication as user experience in a broadening industry landscape. Technical Communication, 63(3), 248--264.

16.

Lauer, C. & Brumberger, E. (2019). Redefining writing for the responsive workplace. College Composition and Communication, 70(4), 634--663.

17.

Marshall

Cook

Mitchell

Summerskill

Haines

Maguire

, … Case

(2015). Design and evaluation: End users, user datasets and personas. Applied Ergonomics, 46, 311–317.

18.

McGinn

Kotamraju

(2008). Data-driven persona development. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM (pp. 1521–1524). New York, NY: ACM.

19.

Mears

(2013). Personas—The beginner’s guide. theUXreview. Retrieved from https://theuxreview.co.uk/personas-the-beginners-guide/

20.

Meloncon

(2017). Embodied personas for a mobile world. Technical Communication, 64(1), 50–65.

21.

Nielsen

(n.d.). Personas. In Soegaard

Dam

R. F.

(Eds.), The encyclopedia of human-computer interaction (2nd ed.). Aarhus, Denmark: The Interaction Design Foundation. Retrieved from https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-encyclopedia-of-human-computer-interaction-2nd-ed/personas

22.

Pruitt

Grudin

(2003, January). Personas: Practice and theory. Retrieved from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/personas-practice-and-theory.pdf

23.

Rainey

Turner

Dayton

(2005). Do curricula correspond to managerial expectations? Core competencies for technical communicators. Technical Communication, 52(3), 323–352.

24.

Savage

Sullivan

(Eds.). (2001). Writing a professional life: Stories of technical communicators on and off the job. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

25.

Spillers

(2017). Your personas are garbage without good user research. Retrieved from https://www.experiencedynamics.com/blog/2017/01/your-personas-are-garbage-without-good-user-research

26.

Turner

(2011). Is stereotyping inevitable when designing with personas? Design Studies, 32(1), 30–44.

27.

usability.gov. (2018). Personas. Retrieved from https://www.usability.gov/how-to-and-tools/methods/personas.html

28.

Young

(2016). Describing personas. Retrieved from https://medium.com/inclusive-software/describing-personas-af992e3fc527

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.24 MB