Ways to keep your skills sharp

There’s no short­age of con­fer­ences, train­ing web sites, and webi­na­rs to keep your skills sharp.

As I stat­ed in an ear­li­er blog entry, I believe it’s up to you to keep your­self mar­ketable and cre­ate your own train­ing plan. I like this quote from a recruiter: “You can’t rely on a com­pa­ny for your growth and train­ing anymore…Except for a few enlight­ened com­pa­nies, if they’re train­ing you at all, they’re train­ing you for what they need, not nec­es­sar­i­ly train­ing for what you need to devel­op your tech­ni­cal skills over the long run.”

My pro­fes­sion­al devel­op­ment plan includ­ing attend­ing a con­fer­ence every two to three years, aug­ment­ed with reg­u­lar self-direct­ed learn­ing. The last few years I’ve attend­ed and pre­sent­ed at two Writ­er­sUA con­fer­ences. Between con­fer­ences, I sign up for tech­ni­cal writ­ing webi­na­rs and read busi­ness and tech­nol­o­gy books. I also sub­scribe to Wired. Last year, I signed up for a mem­ber­ship to Lynda.com.

Lynda.com

Lynda.com teach­es com­put­er skills in video for­mat to mem­bers through month­ly and annu­al sub­scrip­tion-based plans. I’ve found it help­ful for learn­ing how to cre­ate EPUBs and brush­ing up on Robo­Help, FrameMak­er, Microsoft Office pro­grams, Cas­cad­ing Style Sheets (CSS), and Search Engine Opti­miza­tion for web sites.  One glar­ing exception—Lynda.com does not offer train­ing for Mad­Cap Flare.

Recorded webinars

I reg­u­lar­ly watch record­ed webinars.

Adobe offers free record­ed videos for tech­ni­cal writers:

http://tinyurl.com/y3j72x

Mad­Cap also offers free webinars:

http://tinyurl.com/lv8vrcq

Scrip­to­ri­um Pub­lish­ing offers time­ly and insight­ful thoughts on tech­ni­cal writ­ing trends:

http://tinyurl.com/kxa67qn

The Soci­ety for Tech­ni­cal Com­mu­ni­ca­tion also offers webi­na­rs for a fee:

http://tinyurl.com/mhvkg8a

Conferences

Here’s a sum­ma­ry of upcom­ing con­fer­ences this year.

Mad­World 2014 World­wide Learn­ing Con­fer­ence, April 13–15, San Diego
http://www.madcapsoftware.com/events/madworld/

Con­tent Man­age­ment Strategies/DITA North Amer­i­ca 2014, April 28–30, Seattle
http://www.cm-strategies.com/2014/index.htm

STC annu­al con­fer­ence, May 18–21, Phoenix
http://summit.stc.org/program-info/program-overview/

Lava­con, Octo­ber 13–15, 2014, Portland
http://lavacon.org/2014/about-portland/

How do you keep your skills current?