STS Blog

The I’d Rather Be Writing techcom blog posts 10 Alternative Tests for Technical Writing Job Candidates. Not all of the ideas apply to our situation at STS, as we are all technical writers here, we don’t really have in-house documentation, and tend to recruit more entry-level folks who we can mold to our ways before they are corrupted by outside influences. However, there were some interesting suggestions.

I like number 10, especially:

Check to see whether the writer formatted his or her resume with styles.

I look at the formatting of resumes, cover letters, and writing samples in detail before I read them. Seriously, folks. Your resume is a great opportunity to show that you have some grasp of good information mapping practices as well as some skill in Microsoft Word. (And as awful as Word is, most technical writers will be using it an awful lot.)

Using styles gives you bonus points in my book. But if you don’t use styles, you should at least make sure the formatting is consistent. If some of your job titles are 10 pt. and some are 11 pt., I will notice. If you have two hard returns between some items and one between others, I will notice. If you use strings of spaces instead of tabs or paragraph styles to position your text, it will never line up perfectly, and I will notice.

Lack of attention to detail is a deal breaker in a candidate, and a poorly formatted resume is a great big warning sign about your ability to spot those tedious errors that a quality technical writer must be able to spot.

Tell Someone About This Post:

The client that I currently work for requires all employees and contractors to be available on a proprietary instant messaging system at all times during working hours.

Unfortunately, mixing Captivate and instant messaging programs can cause issues with the auto-labeling feature during your capture sessions:

Not only can it get annoying when your captured slides show a callout for every time that you received a message, I’ve also found that Captivate 2 has a nasty tendency to crash about 50% of the times that an instant message comes in - this has cost me hours in terms of lost time and effort, so watch out! Of course, there’s no good way to tell if the issue is due to Captivate or the instant messaging app, but I suspect both of them are contributing. I’ve found a good number of confirmed bugs in Captivate when it runs by itself.

I now make a habit (with my manager’s approval) of “dropping off the radar” and shutting off all applications whenever I am about to capture a Captivate simulation. I suggest you do the same.

And hey, by shutting off Outlook you might just discover how much you enjoy ignoring e-mails.

Tell Someone About This Post:

eLearning Weekly has a love/hate relationship with Captivate. It’s fun to read about it, especially since they point out workarounds that might save me some time.

Mobilemind also has some tips on how to avoid breaking SCORM when using Captivate.

Ah… nothing is as beautiful as the majestic Captivate bug in its natural habitat!

Here’s a few other things I’ve learned about this wonderful tool (version 2 in particular):

• Don’ t waste your time trying to double up elements (imate-text, image-image, or text-text) on the same area. It confuses Captivate and just doesn’t work.
• Be careful (and do looots of testing) if you use lots of click boxes on the same slide… they tend to mess up when there are more than one or two.
• If you need to import an animation, turn it into a .swf beforehand to avoid problems. In the past, I’ve tried to use animated .gifs with mixed results.
• Run Captivate by itself - kill as many other applications and processes as you can to avoid crashes (iTunesHelper.exe is not an essential operating system process). Save your work often. Even though you should be doing both of these things already, it’s especially important when working with The Cap.

Stay tuned… I work with this beast on an almost daily basis so I’m sure there will be more tips coming!

[Picture of leaf-cutters by mariandy_gizfel.]

Tell Someone About This Post: