tcworld conference 2026 Conference program Detail

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From Typewriters to Touchscreens (and AI): Navigating 50 Years of Technical Communication Disruption

  • Presentation
  • Career, Skills & Professional Development
  • 11. November
  • 10:00 AM (CET) - 10:45 AM (CET)
  • C5.1
  • Sharon Burton

    Sharon Burton

    • Anthrobytes Media LLC

Contents

The rapid rise of generative AI has left many technical communicators questioning the future of their roles, job profiles, and long-term career viability. But this is not the first time the discipline has faced a foundational disruption. Over the last five decades, our profession has successfully re-engineered itself through many changes: moving from longhand manuscripts and typewriters to desktop publishing, topic-based authoring, structured DITA authoring, component content management systems (CCMS), and automated content operations (ContentOps).

This presentation provides a discussion and a blueprint for professional resilience by analyzing the collective, firsthand career histories of nearly 70 international technical communication veterans collected and published in Women in Technical Communication (XML Press, 2026). This session delivers a practical analysis of how practitioners successfully managed past technological disruptions and what specific core competencies allowed them to pivot into higher-value roles.

Takeaways

Attendees leave this session not with fear of the future, but with a clear understanding of their current skill sets and how to future-proof their careers against the next wave of automation.

Prior knowledge

Knowledge of the field of technical communication. No historical or technical prerequisites required.

Speaker

Sharon Burton

Sharon Burton

  • Anthrobytes Media LLC
Biography

Sharon Burton helps people and organizations make sense of complex stuff through smart content strategy. By day, she works as a content strategist, helping businesses design content that actually works—for the company and for the humans using it. By night, she teaches “baby engineers” at the University of California, Riverside, showing them how to communicate like pros.

Armed with a graduate degree in cultural anthropology, Sharon has spent her career exploring how people find, use, and trust information—and how better content design can transform the user experience and the business bottom line. She’s taught more than 8,000 people in corporate and university settings, proving that good communication is as much a system as it is a science.

She’s the co-author of Engineering Words (XML Press, 2025) and the editor of Women in Technical Communication: From Typewriters to Touchscreens (XML Press, 2026), a living history of women shaping technology through words.

When she’s not untangling messy content ecosystems, Sharon can be found sewing, knitting, cooking, baking bread, growing things, riding her bike (or a motorcycle), and occasionally trying to lift something heavy at the gym.

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