Coast lines: Who is Karen Bentley? Can you tell us more about the Crystal Decisions documentation department?

Bentley: I have a B.Sc. from UBC, and my major was Computer Science. I started working for Crystal Decisions in 1998 as the documentation coordinator, managing the American vendor that we used to write our documentation. In 1999, I started hiring writers to create a team in-house. As of January 2003 we have 14 people on the team, including two co-op students, and we do all of our documentation in-house. The team is divided into two smaller teams: the SDK team and the admin/end-user doc team. We produce many different types of documentation; for example technical code samples, API reference material, administrator guides, user guides, and release notes. We use FrameMaker 7 for most of our documentation, however our .NET documentation is written in MS Word, and our JavaDocs are written as comments right in the code.

Coast lines: Has the employment situation for technical communicators in the Lower Mainland recovered from the dot com downturn?

Bentley: I think things are starting to pick up. We seem to be getting fewer résumés for open positions lately, and the candidates we talk to seem to have offers elsewhere; this wasn’t the case in the summer of 2002.

Coast lines: Do larger companies tend to adopt the strategy of increasing permanent head count, rather than outsourcing or hiring contractors?

Bentley: When I first started hiring people in-house, I was told the trend was to contract out, but I haven’t seen any proof of that. We tend to do as much writing in-house as possible. We use co-op students extensively in the hopes that one of them will come back to us as a permanent employee one day. We do use contractors occasionally for short, smaller projects if we’re short on resources.

Coast lines: What is Crystal’s policy in regards to recruiting and keeping the most qualified staff?

Bentley: Our policy is to hire only the best people and to treat them right. Hiring the best doesn’t necessarily mean hiring the person with the most experience; it means hiring the person with the right knowledge, skills, and the best attitude. To date, I haven’t lost anyone to another documentation team/company; in fact our turnover is very low. We pay well, we have given out bonuses for the last five quarters, and we have a very open, casual team atmosphere.

Coast lines: Your advice to both novices and veterans in the industry?
Bentley: Be open to expanding your skills. Being able to write isn’t always enough – knowing Perl, or JavaScript, or XML is a big plus. Also be open to taking on a less-than-perfect job until the right one comes up. It’s okay to be working at a job that isn’t related to writing as long as you’re still actively looking for a writing-related job. If you can afford it, go back to school, or take some technical courses while you’re working.

For further information about Crystal Decisions:
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Job postings: http://www.crystaldecisions.com/about/jobs/