Content Engineering is a term applied to an engineering specialty dealing with the issues around the use of content in computer-facilitated environments. Content production, content management, content modeling, content conversion, and content use and re purposing are all areas involving this specialty.

Building a Content Engineering Practice Starting with Existing Staff

Great CEs are multiplex thinkers, capable of pattern recognition among multiple strata, and multiple dimensions. These individuals naturally connect to the content strategy at a visionary level and map that strategy to all the enabling technologies. Above all, insightful and comfortable communicating between disciplines, they are able to use their cross-functional abilities to see relationships and build information structures others might find daunting.

To find the natural born CE’s for your CEM teams look for those who have at least some background as generalist web developers and who additionally exhibit the following characteristics:

· They might not be deep coders, but they understand and can work with CSS, JavaScript, HTML, and responsive frameworks such as Bootstrap.

· They might not be deep content strategists, but understand the content strategy role and functions with some level of intimacy.

· They might not be expert user experience designers, but they understand information architecture, user heuristics, prototyping tools and approaches.

· They might not be deep search engine optimization (SEO) specialists but they understand how content, schema, metadata, Page Rank and content relationships influence content placement, structure and ranking within search engine results pages (SERPs).

· They might not be software engineers, but they understand the web and software development life cycle (SDLC), the software and hardware stack that delivers web applications, and core application architecture concepts.

· They might not be native iOS or Android mobile application developers, but they understand how apps consume content APIs and send user generated content back to the CEM platform.

· They might not be database administrators (DBA), but they understand the basics of data modeling, database design, entity relationships, and the value of data structure and normalization.

· They might not be expert digital marketers, but they understand sales funnels, marketing automation, a/b testing, conversion optimization, and the importance of capturing and guiding user attention.

· They might not be project managers, but they understand project rhythms, structures, collaboration approaches, and they work well as facilitators and communicators.

Of course the CE must be trained on content modeling, metadata structures, markup, schema, and taxonomy. These elements form the foundation of how content relationships are defined and communicated.