After the boom of BPO, KPO and LPO in the country, it is now the turn of technical writing outsourcing (TWO). In an uncertain market, where the fear of getting a pink slip is growing by the day, here’s some good news. There is absolutely no slowdown in hiring technical writers.

In fact, there are a whopping 10,000 jobs available in this growing market, and its scope expanding to include audios, videos for the products, and writing end to end business proposals for client companies overseas, officials of the Indian arm of Society for Technical Communication (STC), a global body of technical writers, say.

“The market meltdown has not affected the technical writing jobs with over 10,000 vacancies available at present in the market because of the lack of awareness of technical writing as a career,” Makarand Pandit, managing director of Technowrite and programme manager of Tenth STC India Conference 2008, told Financial Chronicle.

He says besides the US, companies from Europe, West Asia, Iraq and Israel are sourcing work from India to cut costs. “At present, more than 50 per cent of the technical communication jobs are engaged in servicing clients overseas,” he says.

Apart from IT sector, pharmaceuticals, research and development, science labs are on a hiring spree due to increased demands.

In fact, Pandit says, besides writing manuals, the scope is expanding to translation jobs in Chinese, Japanese and Indian languages. “Today, technical writers are also required to produce audios and videos for products and services of the clients," he says. The delivery mechanism of technical writing is changing with companies gearing up to provide online manuals for products and services for their customers across the globe in real time.

“Another emerging outsourcing business for technical writers in India is writing complete end-to-end business proposals and quality user documents in business dealings for clients abroad,” Pandit says, adding for every one technical writer, at present companies are adding 8-10 technical writers on their staff.

Alpana Gulvani, manager with Tibco Software firm, with a staff of six technical writers, says increasingly IT, pharmaceutical and manufacturing companies have been enquiring for a sizable talent pool for technical writing, but there were few qualified people.

Pune-based Techno-writes with 20 on its staff, which conducts a full-time three-month rigorous diploma course in technical writing at Rs 30,000 fee, has trained 150 students since last April and all have been absorbed in the industry.

“We don’t admit students without a Rs 1,000 screening test-to-test suitability of the students for the course and the career,” Pandit says, adding that Pune topped in the average salaries for technical writers at Rs 8.5 lakh per annum followed by Delhi at Rs 7.5 lakh per annum.

Paresh Nail, STC salary survey coordinator and manger, Technical Writing and Translation of Emptoris Technologies, a Pune-based firm which has 25 technical writers on its staff, said according to STC 2007 salary survey, Indian technical writers were paid a third of their counterparts in Europe and the US. “In this global meltdown, where companies were slashing staff, for every loss of job in technical writing in the US and Europe, we are gaining at least two in India,” he says.

With the rise in demand for technical writers, Nail says the salaries are being hiked in the country to attract top talent. There are at present 12,000 technical writers in India, out of which 5,000 in Bangalore and 2,000 in Pune.