The 2022 Miniconference has a varied slate of presentations and presenters. While scheduling is still being worked out, take a peek at the slate of awesome presenters coming your way!
Schedule
- 8:30 – 8:50am MiniConference Startup
- 9am – 9:50am How My Cats Helped Me Quickly Develop Training Materials – Jamye Sagan
- 10am – 10:50am Career Advancement Through Personal Branding – Jack Molisani
- 11am – 11:50am Handling Almost-But-Not-Quite-the-Same-Content in MadCap Flare – Erika Frensley
- 12pm – 1:15pm Lunch/networking
- 1:30pm – 2:20pm Getting to Great Documentation – Robert Delwood
- 2:30pm – 3:20pm Transferrable Skills – The Bridge to Meaningful Career Experiences – Agnes Mends Crentsi
- 3:20pm – 3:45pm Conference Wrap-up
How My Cats Helped Me Quickly Develop Training Materials
Jamye Sagan
In an ideal world, we have unlimited time and resources with which to create stellar training programs and materials. However, the real world does not offer us this luxury. Sometimes, we have only days in which to plan, design, and distribute training deliverables that need to engage learners, yet still be simple enough to produce and distribute. In this session, we will review nine steps for quickly assembling a basic training program from start to finish.
Within the framework of relevant cat photos and anecdotes, we will examine each step and share specific tips and strategies for implementing these steps. Where relevant, we will also review some real-life training examples. By the end of this presentation, you will have the necessary knowledge to respond effectively to most last-minute training requests.
Takeaways include the following:
- Identify what your learners need to know; doing so will help you maintain 20/20 focus on developing your training materials.
- Keep materials simple by dividing content into manageable sections, using templates, and reusing content where possible.
- Take time to develop evaluation tools – even a simple checklist or survey – to make sure your training is effective.
Biography
As the Pharmacy Communication Advisor for H-E-B, Jamye helps design training programs and materials for various projects and initiatives in the pharmacy department. She also manages communications between the corporate office and the store pharmacies.
An STC Associate Fellow, Jamye is the current President of the South Central Texas chapter and Treasurer for the Instructional Design & Learning SIG. She also serves at the Society level with the Community Affairs Committee, and has been part of several other committees.
When not making “sense out of the seemingly senseless” in the tech comm world, Jamye enjoys transforming yarn into pretty and useful objects. She lives in San Antonio, TX.
Transferrable Skills – The Bridge to Meaningful Career Experiences
Agnes Mends Crentsil
Product Marketing Manager, NETSCOUT
Do you feel stuck in your career? Are you wondering how to move into an adjacent career to expand your knowledge and experience? The only constant in life is, change and long before it happens, we must be ready to adapt. Join me to learn from my personal journey how I made the transition from Technical Publications into Technical Product Marketing.
In this Webinar you will learn:
- The single element that propelled my transition
- How to leverage your skill set to build a Personal Inventory
- The missing ingredient from Your Career Assessment
- How Going beyond Your Career ushers in success
About the Presenter:
Agnes M Crentsil works as a product marketing manager at NETSCOUT. She has a passion for developing content strategies for enterprise and service provider solutions. After 20 years of working in the Technical Communication field, she joined the technical product marketing team at NETSCOUT and is responsible for developing content assets to drive campaign initiatives, while supporting sales.
Agnes is a member of the technical communications advisory board at the University of North Texas at Denton, she runs the mentoring program with the STC Lone Star chapter and has volunteered on the Community Achievement Awards (CAA) committee, and the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Advisory (DEIAP) panel for the national STC organization.
When not working, she enjoys traveling with her family and spending time with her mixed breed (pit bull, lab, terrier mix) dog – Aston. Agnes has two young adults – A girl and a boy.
Career Advancement Through Personal Branding
Jack Molisani
I recently went to a conference where attendees’ name tags included the phrase, “Ask me about… [then the answer attendees provided when registering].” While the intent was to give attendees a way to break the ice when networking, I realized the whole concept of personal branding could be summarized by that simple statement, ‘Ask me about…’
How is technical communication viewed in your organization? Does your boss’s boss think of your department as a core part of the development team, or a burdensome commodity to be acquired at the lowest possible price given an acceptable level of quality?
What are you doing to promote your corporate value and advance your career?
What should people ask you about…?
About the Speaker
Jack Molisani is the president of ProSpring Technical Staffing, an employment agency specializing in technical writers and other content professionals: http://ProspringStaffing.com
He’s the author of Be The Captain of Your Career: A New Approach to Career Planning and Advancement, which hit #5 on Amazon’s Career and Resume Best Seller list.
Jack produces the LavaCon Conference on Content Strategy and TechComm Management which will (hopefully!) be in Portland this November https://lavacon.org
Getting to Great Documentation
Robert Delwood
Lead API Documentation Writer
Producing documentation is easy. It’s getting to great documentation that’s hard.
Great documentation is a suite that is complete, deep, and instills peace of mind at every step. That is, readers are confident that everything they’re doing is correct, in the right order, know what the side effects are, and what the next step is. It’s a team effort but not in the conventional way some think.
Companies once thought that lone writers with subject matter expert help is all that was needed. If that was ever true, it produced shallow documentation. It’s not true now. It doesn’t just even take a team. All team members must take on new responsibilities. First, writers must be seen as quarterbacks for the documentation in that they coordinate and educate team members. Second, they themselves need to become the subject matter expert, for less reliance on others. Third, now that others have fewer responsibilities, they get to take on new responsibilities relating to documentation.
This talk will outline these ideas, techniques, and roles for the technical writer, how to implement these ideas, and how to be the quarterback for the documentation project.
About the Presenter
I am a programmer, writer, and programmer-writer in Chicago’s legal community but formerly with NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. I’m passionate about improving the documentation process. This includes getting others involved, upping the documentation quality, providing automation at all levels, and getting, demanding, or coercing the community for better tools.
delwood@isomedia.com
Handling Almost-But-Not-Quite-the-Same-Content in MadCap Flare
Erika Frensley
Do you handle documentation for multiple products that are very similar? MadCap Flare provides tools to handle quick rebranding and reorganization for multiple documentation projects. And even better, these techniques can be applied to Adobe Robohelp, FrameMaker, or any other product that uses variables and conditional text functions. This presentation will describe how I use these functions to handle rebranding and reversioning of a product with many different configurations and very, very tight deadlines, and how you can apply it to your own documentation projects.
About the Presenter
Erika Frensley has been a technical writer for 30 years in the software, oil and gas, and medical fields. Currently she is working as the main technical writer at Bluware, Inc, using MadCap Flare to keep projects in line. She has been active with the STC Houston and STC South Central Chapter for many years, serving on the Admin Council in various positions including President of the STC Houston and STC South Central Chapter.