What communicators will be doing in 10 years

Your writer and editor colleagues predict what corporate communication jobs will look like in 2017

The life of a corporate writer and editor isn’t perfect—hardly!—but it’s a relatively steady living. Our jobs are more stable and secure than those of many others in the organization.

The average tenure of a CEO, for instance, is about five years. Since our efforts aren’t tied directly to business results and quarterly analysts’ expectations, corporate communicators usually hang around longer.

But we worry.

We see presidential debates based on questions from YouTube videos, not professional journalists.

We remember that 10 years ago we used to spend more time on craft—remember typography? remember photography?—and our jobs seemed more like a bankable trade.

We notice that much social media happens without the aid of editors, and e-mail has turned everyone into a writer.

We wonder: What will our jobs look like 10 years from now? We worry: Will we have jobs then, and will those jobs be tolerable? We hope: Will those jobs be stimulating?

We have no answers.