by Janus Boye
“Great. Now you can ask ‘would you like fries with that ?’ in seven languages”
This is what CJ Walker’s family and friends jokingly told her when she graduated as a linguist. Back then in the ’90s, the job market wasn’t exactly booming with demand for people trained at modelling and documenting language, but much has fortunately happened since then.
Following extensive work on user manuals and technical communication jobs at Alcatel, HP, the European Union, and Microsoft, in 2007 she founded Firehead, to focus exclusively on content recruitment and training. Since then, she has actively helped shape the content strategy community, trained and placed people in content jobs around the world.
She also helped organise the very first content strategy conference in Paris in 2010 and is our expert of the month.
Working with content in the early days of the Web
At the beginning of her career, CJ also worked with content, but not for the Web, but as a technical author and editor. Technical communication is the field many linguists choose to work in because it requires a precise understanding of language.
Among the jobs that shaped her early experience with large, complex and global organisations, was almost 5 years as Consultant Technical Editor at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. She then moved to France in 1997 to work as an editor for technical communicators at telecommunications firm Alcatel.
Her former boss then called in the early 2000s and wanted CJ to be the boss for Continental European recruitment working from home. This is something she really enjoyed. Rather than meeting people to talk about technical specifications, she now started meeting people to talk about other peoples’ work. And getting people jobs was really rewarding.
Recruiting for what became the content strategy boom
Her family led her to move to Sweden in 2007, and she started Firehead to do recruitment for technical communication and other content jobs. Coincidently, this is when content strategy started taking off.
“The web is sexier than user manuals” as CJ said in our conversation.
To give back to the community, CJ was also involved in organising the first Content Strategy conference in Paris in 2010. The ash cloud caused some nerve-wracking for the organisers as flights were cancelled, but CJ felt that the entire content strategy wave was her ship that came in for content.
Now her background in linguistics was really helpful - way beyond just ordering in restaurants. There is so much to classify and model and strategise.
What’s next for content?
My conversation with CJ felt both like talking to a friendly mentor with vast experience and also someone with youthful curiosity. When she talked about how AI and Fourth Industrial Revolution will change things, I could sense the energy on the other end of the line.
CJ mentioned these current megatrends for content:
From shouting into a megaphone to a conversation.
Much more structure and focus around conversational design - no longer just linear procedures.
Bridging the gap between the technical communications community and new content needs for robotics and AI
In closing, I asked her what she was hiring for at the moment and she answered that content strategist and others who also masters plain language are still in massive need, but elaborated with these emerging roles:
“The field is dynamic but among the trending recruitment areas are currently conversation design and AI, metadata, taxonomy, ontology, augmented reality and people who work in search.”
Learn more about CJ Walker
CJ has recently worked on a training program for upskilling digital communicators. Besides herself, the courses are developed by industry luminaries like Rahel Bailie on content operations and Noz Urbina on content modelling and many more coming.
Just last month, she did a podcast with ISTC on The Fourth Revolution discussing the impact of artificial intelligence on the technical comms community.
She was also on our list of 10 European content strategists to watch in 2011, where we highlighted her “Who can sort your content strategy? flowchart.
Finally, you can also meet CJ in person at our upcoming Boye 21 Aarhus conference in November.