Technical Writers
Want this summary on your site? Embed code:
Automation risk
High Risk (61-80%): Jobs in this category face a significant threat from automation, as many of their tasks can be easily automated using current or near-future technologies.
More information on what this score is, and how it is calculated is available here.
User poll
Our visitors have voted they are unsure if this occupation will be automated. However, the automation risk level we have generated suggests a much higher chance of automation: 79% chance of automation.
What do you think the risk of automation is?
What is the likelihood that Technical Writers will be replaced by robots or artificial intelligence within the next 20 years?
Sentiment
The following graph(s) are included wherever there is a substantial amount of votes to render meaningful data. These visual representations display user poll results over time, providing a significant indication of sentiment trends.
Sentiment over time (yearly)
Growth
The number of 'Technical Writers' job openings is expected to rise 5.5% by 2032
Total employment, and estimated job openings
Updated projections are due 09-2023.
Wages
In 2022, the median annual wage for 'Technical Writers' was $79,960, or $38 per hour
'Technical Writers' were paid 72.7% higher than the national median wage, which stood at $46,310
Wages over time
Volume
As of 2022 there were 48,620 people employed as 'Technical Writers' within the United States.
This represents around < 0.001% of the employed workforce across the country
Put another way, around 1 in 3 thousand people are employed as 'Technical Writers'.
Job description
Write technical materials, such as equipment manuals, appendices, or operating and maintenance instructions. May assist in layout work.
SOC Code: 27-3042.00
Resources
If you're thinking of starting a new career, or looking to change jobs, we've created a handy job search tool which might just help you land that perfect new role.
People also viewed
Comments
Leave a comment
Curating and organizing the information to feed to the AI, and checking their output for accuracy, may be one of the few jobs left to tech writers.
As technical writers we understand complex systems (as well as the engineer's gibberish that often comes with it) and are able to translate this into a form that is easily understood by the respective user groups, i.e. operators or maintenance personnel.
In my opinion AI nowadays can provide draft text to the technical writers. But it takes a human to process that into understandable content, because only a human can know what is necessary for others to profit from precise instructions and related warnings. Also when it comes to jurisdiction.
Who will be held accountable for injury or death caused by automated AI that simply pretends to be human-like but has otherwise no conscience? I mean, an AI can tell you that a stove is hot, but does this mean it really knows the consequences of touching it?
Some learned it the hard way, I doubt an AI can.
I don’t see this role being completely automated in 10 years.
More importantly, why would anyone pay for a professional to do it?
We are already implementing automated structured reuse on a large scale. People should not underestimate the potential of computational linguistics when combined with machine learning and a knowledge graph-rich future.
Although intelligent content (structured content with human-declared intent) cannot be automated yet, we are already auto-classifying content with additional semantic metadata (taxonomies). AI/ML will continue to assist and eventually replace a significant portion of low-level content development, which will elevate the writer's role to that of an information architect/designer.
Object-oriented content will then become a service called Content-as-a-Service (CaaS), much like an electrical distribution grid.
In TechComm and MarComm, we have been evolving towards this model for many years.
I cannot fathom how AI would somehow be able to do all the things that are required to be done in order to complete a technical writing piece.
AI has already taken over the writing niche . . . people no longer need education to write, software helps them do it. That is all AI could ever do for a writer.
Leave a reply about this occupation