Now Open: The 2024 Content Design Skills Survey

Catbird Content’s Content Design Skills Survey is now open! Take before January 16, 2024 to get a personalized report for free.

Who should take it?

People who are content designers or people studying content design who want to assess their familiarity and comfort with more than 90 different skills.

If that’s you, taking the survey is free of charge. The skills are large and small, covering skills in content, design, research, leadership, AI, and adjacent methods and systems. All of them are used in some content design roles, and a few of them are used in every content design role that I know of.

Survey takers get three big outcomes:

1. Your survey experience as a tool to think holistically about your content design skills, celebrate those skills, and think about which skills you might want to pursue building.
2. Input into a worldwide analysis of the state of content design skills, based on anonymized and aggregated survey data.
3. You become eligible for:
   Your personalized skills report (available late Jan 2024): Your top 5 differentiating skills, the business impacts you could focus on making with those skills, and skills you could consider building to increase your impact. (Bonus: If you take the survey before January 16, you’ll automatically get a personalized skills report for FREE.)
   Group and/or individual coaching (available late Jan 2024) based on your content design skills report and survey responses. (Session information and sliding-scale fees to be announced in January 2024.)

Yes! WE AREOPEN. Vector image by Freepik

So… it’s just a list of skills?

I started with just a list of skills, thanks to the leaders and attendees at Button 2023. And then it grew: I ran a beta survey in October to test my assumptions, and conducted user research with survey takers to learn more. This v1 survey follows up on that analysis, which means I’ve clarified some skills and added a few more.

I’ve also worked to articulate each skill: the impacts it can make, the contexts in which the skill is useful, and the scope and authority a content designer needs to use the skill successfully.

That’s what I’m hoping to make useful to survey takers, and to design teams who want to be using content design skills to meet business goals.

Here’s how it breaks down:

In the survey, there’s the skill name, definition, and example statement for each skill.

In the individual skill reports, there’s the names, definitions, and examples of the person’s top 5 strengths and top 5 skills to build, plus:

• Descriptions of a business impacts a content designer could make with each of those skills
• Contexts in which an organizations can make use of each of those skills
• Scope and authority required for the content designer trying to use each of those skills
• Resources to learn about and/or get training in each of those skills (still gathering these! If you provide a resource, I’d love to know about it. Suggest resources here.)

In an aggregate report about the state of content design, I’m planning to report:

• Where content designers come from (geographically, and from diverse disciplines)
• How long we’ve been practicing content design
• The skills we most commonly use
• The impacts we’re more commonly poised to make
• … and more 😁

The bottom line

I’m very serious about making sure that everybody who creates experiences knows about the impacts we can make with content design skills. This project is one framework for that, and I’m looking forward to helping people using these tools to advocate for impacts in their products, their careers, and their workplaces.

I want to:

• Help content designers evaluate what skills would help build toward their career goals, by using the experience of taking the survey, and optionally receiving the report and signing up for coaching. I want content design to keep becoming the vibrant career path it could be, with designers like me getting paid to meet business goals and help users have better experiences.
• Help design team leadership connect their teams’ skills to their business goals, with custom surveys, reports, and consulting based on their teams’ skills and the impacts they can make. I want design leaders to keep growing in their understanding of what content designers do and can accomplish for their teams and their business.
• Position Catbird Content as a thought leader in meeting business goals with content design skills. I want to keep growing Catbird Content as a business; it’s only been a few months, and we still have a long way to grow. 🐦

Happy surveying! If you have questions for me, or want to learn more about assessing the content design skills of your UX team (whether or not you work with content designers!), please reach out to me at torrey@catbirdcontent.com.