Investigating Job Advertisements as Interdisciplinary Research

Situated within colleges of engineering and liberal arts and social sciences, the faculty members and students of this panel joined forces because we were interested in researching what technical communication skills appeared in job advertisements from various fields, including content strategy, UX, and engineering. In an effort to blend technical and humanistic methods, our research team is comprised of academics in technical communication and students in engineering and technical communication. We sought to understand our respective fields better by applying a mixed-methods approach to analyzing large sets of job ads. Each panelist will address how this interdisciplinary research frames their thinking and approach to their respective fields and career trajectories, sharing data and findings about content strategy, engineering, and UX job advertisements. Additionally, student members of the panel will demonstrate the Job Ad User Tool (JAUT) and share their insights. Each panelist will end with a discussion of their findings and implications for future studies. The panel offers a replicable research process for surveying the field, and thus far, we have created at least one application of this research for practitioner job applicants to improve job materials. Although our current application focuses on engineering fields, our approach can be applied to other areas, such as content strategy and UX.