The Presence of Professionalism in Technical Communication: Views from Industry and the Academy

Researcher’s note (June 2026). In this short extended abstract, Erin Friess and I asked who actually studies the profession of technical communication, and we found that the answer was largely industry rather than the academy. Our core idea was that professionalism is represented unevenly across industry and academic views: nearly 80% of the professionalism-related articles came from the trade magazine Intercom, while the four research journals published such work far less often, suggesting that researchers had ceded the study of the field’s own professionalization to practitioners and outside disciplines. That question of where a field’s knowledge gets made and valued still anchors my current work on AI in writing and assessment, where I keep asking which voices and which kinds of evidence our tools and methods end up privileging.

Abstract

In this study, we examine 184 articles from four technical communication research journals and one industry magazine that are related to professionalism of the field of technical communication. We found that the majority of the articles related to professionalism came from the industry publication. The research journals also published articles related to professionalism, but at a much lower frequency. The results of the study indicate that technical communication researchers have ceded the responsibility of studying the professionalism and the career of professional technical communicators to others.

Index Terms - Academy/industry divide, professionalism, technical communication

Introduction

The field of technical communication has shifted from being writers who can “document information clearly, correctly, and economically” to “jack of all trades” who still write excellently but also specialize in disparate fields like usability, translation, content strategy, or graphic design [1]. In this study, we build upon prior research on the content alignment among our field’s professional and scholarly publications [2, 3]. Specifically, we explore how academics and industry professionals view professionalization within these publications.

Method

We examined 184 technical communication publications, which were randomly extracted from a 3,601-publication corpus. This corpus included every article published in Intercom, Technical Communication, Technical Communication Quarterly, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, and IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication from 1996–2015. We selected 1996 as our starting point as that was when Intercom changed from a newsletter to a full-fledged professional magazine. We manually coded these articles for a variety of content variables.

Our first analysis examined 184 articles that (out of four categories) we broadly classified as profession. The articles focused primarily on the profession of technical communication; specifically, the role of technical communicators and how that role has changed over time. We also analyzed 184 articles that (out of 17 categories) we classified by the primary topic of professionalization (not all articles classified as profession were necessarily classified as professionalization, so the identical sample counts are coincidental). These articles included discussion of professionalization issues in technical communication as well as narratives that describe the history or current state of technical communication programs and practices.

Findings

Overall, 17.5% of the sample were classified as profession, or articles on how technical communicators perceive themselves and their field. Fourteen out of 17 possible primary topics were also broadly classified as profession. Almost 80% of these articles were published in Intercom and centered on the topic of professionalization, including issues related to certification as well as long-running columns like “My Job,” where technical communicators describe duties with their industry or organization. Other topics associated with profession (albeit in much smaller frequencies) were technology, intercultural communication, communication strategies, and knowledge and information management.

Additionally, the four academic journals published small shares of professionally-focused articles in either category. TC published the most content broadly classified as profession (5.53%) as well as the most content that had a primary topic of professionalization (15.8%). These pieces focused on the professionalization of technical communication programs as well as various approaches to professionalization. Additionally, Intercom published on professionalization over the 20-year period with more consistency than the academic journals. This finding aligns with our previous research that the field’s academic journals often publish more on topics like pedagogy, rhetoric, and assessment than on topics like professionalization, technology, and knowledge and information management [2, 3].

While descriptive statistics can evade the larger picture, the difference in volume between Intercom and the four academic journals on the topic of professionalization is substantial. In 2002, Faber called upon professional communication researchers to understand “the ways professional activities play a role in the future development of [our students’] communities” as well as “offer their own perspectives about the role of the professionals and the ways in which the professions could be perceived and enacted in the future” [4]. Despite that call, it appears as though professional communication researchers have ceded the responsibility of professionalism/career research to the professional communicators themselves or, perhaps, to other fields (such as management, business, or decision sciences). We continue to explore if the content differences among our professional and scholarly publications extend or fragment the perceived value to our own field and outside disciplines.

References

[1] E. Tebeaux, “Let’s not ruin technical writing, too: A comment on the essay of Carolyn Miller and Elizabeth Harris,” College English, vol. 41, no. 7, pp. 822-825, 1980.

[2] R. K. Boettger, E. Friess, and S. Carliner, “Who says what to whom? Assessing the alignment of content and audience between scholarly and professional publications in technical communication (1996-2013),” in Proc. IEEE 2014 Int. Prof. Communication. Conf., Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 2014, pp. 1-6.

[3] R. K. Boettger, S. Carliner, and E. Friess, “Update to who says what to whom? Assessing the alignment of content and audience between scholarly and professional publications in technical communication (1996–2013),” in Proc. IEEE 2015 Int. Prof. Communication Conf., Limerick, Ireland, 2015, pp. 1-6.

[4] B. Faber, “Professional identities: what is professional about professional communication?,” J. of Bus. and Tech. Communication, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 306-337, 2002.