Making the case for the full-stack professional communicator

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend UX Camp YYC 2025: A series of workshops and a one-day conference for user experience (UX) practitioners in the Calgary area.

At one of the conference sessions, Greg Hallihan addressed the growing concern among UX practitioners and other professional communicators that AI is a threat to jobs. Hallihan made the case that it is not so much AI that UX practitioners should worry about but job consolidation. UX work that used to be distributed across multiple roles is now being consolidated into single positions. Employers are essentially asking single UX hires to do the work of entire UX teams.

Based on my own experience, I don’t believe this trend is limited to UX—it potentially impacts all professional communicators, including technical communicators, instructional designers, information architects, copywriters, editors, and others. It may be a result of a shift from the “employees’ market” of the post-pandemic Great Resignation to the “employers’ market” of today, or it might be a longer-term development resulting from streamlining and automation in knowledge work (including, of course, generative AI). In any case, it behoves us as professional communicators to plan for a world where employers will ask for a broader set of skills and experience.

The crosscurrents of generalization and specialization

At first blush, this trend towards generalization seems to run counter to the broader movement towards job specialization that has dominated professional communication for several decades.

When I first began working as a technical communicator in the early 2000s, it was commonly accepted that to prosper in the field—or any other field in professional communication—in the twenty-first century, you needed to specialize. Traditional technical communication roles in which one wrote operating procedures and other “boilerplate” documentation using non-specialized tools like word processors would be “commoditized” and therefore prone to offshoring or other cost saving efforts. To avoid such a fate, you were encouraged to specialize by either focusing on a specific subject matter (such as medical technology) or on a specific skill set (such as structured authoring).

In the subsequent 25 years, we’ve seen an explosion of skills, best practices, and technologies in technical communication specifically and professional communication generally. While the technical communication profession has always been a big tent—covering everything from end-user documentation to developer documentation to business policies and procedures—it’s becoming increasingly specialized. A technical writer creating end-user documentation using a traditional help authoring tool (HAT) has a very different skill set and approach to their work than a technical writer creating API and other developer documentation using a docs-as-code-based toolset, even though both people share the same job title.

A new shield against commoditization

Although specialization has severed as a shield against job commoditization, it comes with risks:

• Focusing exclusively on one or two areas of professional communication could prevent you from developing skills in other areas and narrow your longer-term career prospects.
• There’s no guarantee in a rapidly evolving world that your chosen area of speciality won’t become obsolete.
• While specialization works well in organizations and industries that are large and growing, it’s not an effective strategy for smaller organizations and industries that might be contracting. As anyone who has worked for a small company can attest, everyone must take on multiple roles for the company to succeed—specialization is simply not an option.
• Over-specialization across the profession could limit the opportunity for cross-pollination of ideas and best practices. For example, instruction design is built on principles of learning theories. Many of these principles could benefit technical writers and other professional communicators but because most of us have limited exposure to instructional design, we aren’t aware of and don’t leverage these principles. Similarly, the technical communication best practices of structured authoring and single sourcing are rarely used outside of the field.

To avoid these risks and address the job market that Hallihan has identified while, at the same time, avoiding commoditization, technical writers and others might want to consider a new tact: becoming “full-stack professional communicators.”

The full-stack web developer as a template

If the term “full-stack” seems familiar to you, it may be because I’ve borrowed it from web development. A full-stack web developer is someone skilled in both the front-end (client-side) and back-end (server-side) aspects of web development. Such a developer has expertise in designing a website’s user interface as well as building and maintaining the server, database, and application components of the website’s back-end.

Although full-stack web developers might not have the same depth of knowledge as dedicated front- and back-end developers, they nonetheless have enough knowledge and experience to address the needs of most web development projects. They can also easily pivot to full-time work on front-end or back-end development as needed.

Defining the full-stack professional communicator

A full-stack professional communicator would be someone with a broad understanding of communication theories and best practices and the ability to produce a wide range of communication products for an employer.

This is an example of the types of products and services that might make up a professional communicator’s stack:

A full-stack professional communicator might have greater depth in some areas than others, but they would nonetheless be able to pivot from one area to another to meet the needs of their employers and the broader industry.

As the full-stack professional communicator advances in their career, they could leverage knowledge from areas in which they have worked in the past to new areas. For example, a professional communicator with previous experience in technical writing could leverage their knowledge in structured authoring and single sourcing to streamline the development of training course materials while working as an instructional designer.

This full-stack approach would make professional communicators more resilient and better able to respond to changes in the market.

The 800-pound gorilla in the room: AI

As Hallihan noted at UX Camp YYC 2025, AI isn’t necessarily a threat to UX and other professional communication jobs in the current market, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be a threat in the future.

The potential of AI is daunting. In the long term, most jobs will be impacted by AI in one way or another; some jobs may become redundant.

Learning how to leverage AI is a key strategy to future-proof your career for the next few decades. Another strategy is to broaden your skillset so that you can pivot to new opportunities with little or no downtime for re-training.

In the not-so-distant future, we might see the job titles that emerged in the era of specialization disappear as employers look for people who can work with AI and contribute in ways that cross disciplines. Full-stack professional communicators would prosper in such a future.