Futureproofing content ops: Career growth, structured content, and AI risk
Ready to futureproof your content operations? These upcoming events have the insights you’re looking for!
Chart your AI-ready content ops career (webinar)
In this webinar, Emilie Herman, Director of Content Operations at the Financial Accounting Foundation (FAF), shares lessons from her career journey. Emilie’s journey began in developmental editing and tradebook publishing and evolved into modern content operations.
Through the lens of publishing services and large-scale content workflows, she’ll show how the shift from manual processes to automation mirrors what’s happening with AI, and what that means for your career.
For anyone navigating a career in content ops, this session highlights the opportunities that emerge when you’re willing to learn new tools, hone key content ops skills, and chart a course forward in a rapidly evolving content landscape.
- Date: Wednesday, March 11th
- Time: 11 am Eastern
- Register on Zoom
Can’t make it to the live show? Register, and we’ll send you the recording!
Why Cheap Content Is Expensive and How to Fix It, featuring Dawn Stevens
Will cheap content cost your organization more in the long run? In this webinar, host Sarah O’Keefe and guest Dawn Stevens share how poor workflows, inaccurate source data, and the commoditization race can undermine both product quality and brand trust. Sarah and Dawn also discuss why strategic staffing and mature content ops create the foundation your AI initiatives need to deliver reliable content at scale.
Sarah O’Keefe: I write content that’s great for today. Tomorrow, a new development occurs, and my content is now wrong. We’re down the road of “entropy always wins.” We’re heading towards chaos, and if we don’t care for the content, it’ll fall apart. So what does it look like to have a well-functioning organization with an appropriate balance of automation, AI, and staffing?
Dawn Stevens: I think that goes back to the age-old question of, “What are the skills that we really think are valuable?” We have to see technical documentation as part of the product, not just supporting the product. That means that we, as writers, are involved in all of the design. As we design the documentation, we’re helping design the UX.
Futureproof your content ops for the coming knowledge collapse
What happens when AI accelerates faster than your content can keep up? In this podcast, host Sarah O’Keefe and guest Michael Iantosca break down the current state of AI in content operations and what it means for documentation teams and executives. Together, they offer a forward-thinking look at how professionals can respond, adapt, and lead in a rapidly shifting landscape.
Sarah O’Keefe: How do you talk to executives about this? How do you find that balance between the promise of what these new tool sets can do for us, what automation looks like, and the risk that is introduced by the limitations of the technology? What’s the roadmap for somebody that’s trying to navigate this with people that are all-in on just getting the AI to do it?
Michael Iantosca: We need to remind them that the current state of AI still carries with it a probabilistic nature. And no matter what we do, unless we add more deterministic structural methods to guardrail it, things are going to be wrong even when all the input is right.
From PowerPoint to possibilities: Scaling with structured learning content
What if you could escape copy-and-paste and build dynamic learning experiences at scale? In this podcast, host Sarah O’Keefe and guest Mike Buoy explore the benefits of structured learning content. They share how organizations can break down silos between techcomm and learning content, deliver content across channels, and support personalized learning experiences at scale.
The good thing about structured authoring is that you have a structure. If this is the concept that we need to talk about and discuss, here’s all the background information that goes with it. With that structure comes consistency, and with that consistency, you have more of your information and knowledge documented so that it can then be distributed and repackaged in different ways. If all you have is a PowerPoint, you can’t give somebody a PowerPoint in the middle of an oil change and say, “Here’s the bare minimum you need,” when I need to know, “Okay, what do I do if I’ve cross-threaded my oil drain bolt?” That’s probably not in the PowerPoint. That could be an instructor story that’s going to be told if you have a good instructor who’s been down that really rocky road, but again, a consistent structure is going to set you up so that you have robust base content.
— Mike Buoy
Structured Learning Content That’s Built to Scale, featuring Becky Mann
Teams are under pressure to do more—more formats, languages, publishing outputs, and audiences. After an acquisition, CompTIA faced fragmented systems, manual processes, and time-consuming formatting. In this webinar, see how CompTIA used structured learning content operations to scale globally and meet evolving delivery demands.
Now, we have a central content ecosystem where everything connects into one spot—our CCMS—where we can actually publish in many different ways. We can do our translations very seamlessly now with our translation memory service linked in. We can publish directly to our LMS record, and we can also deploy PDFs. There’s some other little things that we’ve developed over the years. For example, we map our content to the exam objectives for our certifications. That was always a very manual process. It is now automated, which is amazing.
— Becky Mann
CompTIA accelerates global content delivery with structured learning content
CompTIA plays a pivotal role in the global technical ecosystem. As the largest vendor-neutral training and credentialing organization for technology professionals, CompTIA creates career-advancing opportunities across a wide range of disciplines—cybersecurity, infrastructure, data, and more.
With the support of Scriptorium and other partners, CompTIA consolidated fragmented workflows into a unified ecosystem for structured learning content. The transformation has improved production efficiency and allows CompTIA to deliver global content without pausing ongoing content production. Additionally, it allows instructional designers to invest in compelling learning experiences instead of spending their time manually formatting content.
Every click counts: Uncovering the business value of your product content
Every time someone views your product content, it’s a purposeful engagement with direct business value. Are you making the most of that interaction? In this episode of the Content Operations podcast, special guest Patrick Bosek, co-founder and CEO of Heretto, and Sarah O’Keefe, founder and CEO of Scriptorium, explore how your techcomm traffic reduces support costs, improves customer retention, and creates a cohesive user experience.
Patrick Bosek: Nobody reads a page in your documentation site for no reason. Everybody that is there has a purpose, and that purpose always has an economic impact on your business. People who are on the documentation site are not using your support, which means they’re saving you a ton of money. It means that they’re learning about your product, either because they’ve just purchased it and they want to utilize it, so they’re onboarding, and we all know that utilization turns into retention and retention is good because people who retain pay us more money, or they’re trying to figure out how to use other aspects of the system and get more value out of it. There’s nobody who goes to a doc site who’s like, “I’m bored. I’m just going to go and see what’s on the doc site today.” Every person, every session on your documentation site is there with a purpose, and it’s a purpose that matters to your business.
How CompTIA rebuilt its content ecosystem for greater agility and efficiency (webinar)
After an acquisition, CompTIA faced the challenge of unifying multiple content systems, editorial teams, and delivery formats. To tackle this, they implemented a centralized, structured content model supported by a robust content management system. This webinar details how CompTIA overhauled its content operations from strategy through implementation without a pause in production.
Now we’re going to start seeing the true benefits of working in DITA, which is what I’m most excited about. We can maintain our content easily and focus on where things are changing versus converting, rearranging, or recopying content. I’m excited to see how our efficiencies gain as we move into our refresh cycle.
— Becky Mann
Ready, set, AI: How to futureproof your content, teams, and tech stack (webinar)
Your customers expect intelligent, AI-powered experiences. Is your content strategy ready for an AI-driven world? After a popular panel at ConVEx San Jose, the team at CIDM brought the conversation online in this webinar.
AI is going to require us to think about our content across the organization, across the silos, because at the end of the day, the AI overlord, the chatbot is out there slurping up all this information and regurgitating it. The chatbot doesn’t care that, for example, I work in group A, Marianne’s in group B, and Dipo’s in group C, and we don’t talk to each other. The chatbot, the world, the consumer, sees us all in the same company. If we’re all part of the same organization, why shouldn’t it be consistent?
— Sarah O’Keefe
