Conducting an Interview

As part of TW5212, earlier this week, I interviewed with a professional working in the Higher Education industry. This process involved me preparing a series of questions on a variety of topics to try and learn about them, their career, their field and future trends. It also required me to learn how to carry out an interview appropriately. In this post, I will discuss what I feel I gained from this experience.

The first step in this project was to choose a person to interview. To do so, the class reflected on their interests to determine which area of the fields of technical communication and E-Learning from which we would try to find an interviewee. For me, E-Learning and teaching was very appealing as a subject. I consulted with our lecturer and, through them, I contacted a Department in the University. They, in turn, put me in touch with a person who was interested in being interviewed.

With the interview arranged, I now needed to formulate questions. Doing so began with background research into the subject of the discussion. I gathered as many details as I could about their career using sources such as their University profile page, LinkedIn and even some past interviews in which they had taken part. I then investigated the Higher Education industry as a whole to learn about what the most relevant topics and trends which are currently affecting it include. Based on this background information, I wrote a series of questions which I felt would generate interesting and informative answers.

Organising the questions was a good learning experience. I needed to group the enquiries into categories and organise those categories in a logical order. With the feedback I received on this portion of the assignment, I learned how important it is for the questions to have a natural flow. A crucial part of interviewing is making the interviewee feel at ease. Having a set of queries that progress naturally rather than jumping back and forth between topics can help this. Further, I discovered that it was vital to have planned follow-up questions to make sure more closed questions like “Where did you attend University?” could be built upon as opposed to resulting in a single word answer.

With background information gathered and questions prepared, it was now time for the interview to take place. I think the most important lesson I learned during the conversation was the technique of prioritising the questions I wanted to ask. We had a stringent time limit on the interview because of the participant’s schedule, so I needed to make sure I got the answers to the most significant questions. In practice, this meant I had to skip topics which I felt were less likely to yield interesting information. For instance, I chose not to ask a sequence of questions on the general software tools my interviewee uses daily, in favour of exploring the trends affecting their industry now and in the future. While it is unfortunate that I was unable to investigate areas I was interested in, I believe that I made the correct decision as the information I did get from the questions I deemed most important was, in my opinion, very illuminating.

In summary, this process was incredibly useful in terms of the development of my interviewing skills. As I wrote about in an earlier post, the ability to conduct an interview is essential for a technical writer or E-Learning developer. One needs to be able to gather information from a subject expert if you do not personally have the required knowledge. This assignment has made me far more confident that, should I need to, I will be able to carry out this task again in the future effectively.