Available now: Content Design Skills Reports
Tl;dr: Personalized reports for people who have taken the Content Design Skills Survey are being created and sent to their email addresses! Here’s what’s inside those reports.
Update, 7:15pm PT 1/18: Automation fixed, and corrections sent! More reports are being sent now, and they’ll probably be sent throughout tomorrow (it takes about a minute of processing for each one.)
Update, 3pm PT 1/18: There’s a snag in the automation, which I caught after about 20% of the reports were sent. I’m working to fix the problem, and will send out corrections and restart sending reports soon!
As I wrote when I launched the survey: I’m very serious about making sure that everybody who creates experiences knows about the impacts we can make with content design skills. These personalized reports are one piece of that puzzle. I’m looking forward to helping people advocate for the impacts they can make in their products, their careers, and their workplaces.
What’s inside the reports
- Skills summary: A bar chart shows how your skills are distributed across categories of skills. These categories are content methods, content systems, design methods, design systems, leadership, and research. Each bar is 100% of the skills in that category, with color gradations that show how comfortable you reported being with those skills.
- Impact summary: A radar chart displays how the impacts you can make with your skills are distributed among categories of impact, including financial, product, productivity, regulatory, user, and enhancer impacts. If you reported a comfort level of 4 or above for a skill, you got maximum impact points for it.
- Skills that differentiate you: These are the 5 skills that you reported the greatest comfort with, especially as compared to survey-takers with the same years of experience that you have.
- Skills to learn or practice: These are the 5 skills that could add the most potential impacts to your skill set. This list doesn’t compare you to other content designers, just to the potential impacts for individual skills that you reported lower comfort with using.
- What to do next: Concrete reflection, exploration, and steps to take action.
In addition to the above, each of the ten skills that are called out specifically for you is described with the conditions for using the skill, conditions for success with it, and impacts to focus on making with that skill. Early interviews told me that this was the most valuable part of the report, for them. And I hope that continues to hold true for report recipients! Writing these up was by far the most labor intensive part of this project so far. 😅
Reports on their way
The survey opened with an announcement that anybody who took the survey before January 16, 2024 would get a free report. That means that 778 respondents are getting free reports sent to their email addresses. Holy mackerel! If you see this article, but haven’t seen your report yet, please hang on–it’s on its way. Even with automation, each one takes a few moments of processing time at the rate I can afford to pay, so they’re going to be sent one by one, all day long.
People who took (or have yet to take) the survey after the cut-off date can still get reports, too. To get a report based on your responses, buy one on the Catbird Content website after taking the survey.
Next steps
If you’re looking for resources to help build a specific skill, check out the new Resources page on CatbirdContent.com. There’s also a link there to recommend additions to the resources list.
For people who have already received their reports and want to dive deeper into what it means for them, workshops are available! If you lead a team and want consulting or a custom workshop for that team around these skills, please contact us.
Many people are also waiting to hear about the worldwide, aggregate results! Insights from that analysis will be revealed in a Button party on February 27 at 7:00am PT. More details coming soon, check www.buttonconf.com for details!
