About Abelard Consulting

In the beginning

In 1987 we began trading, under the name Words and Facts. At that time we were primarily a Macintosh software development company, but with a strong focus on documentation.

As competition in the Macintosh domain built, we decided to concentrate on the particular strength that all our clients at the time commented on: excellent documentation.

The move to consulting

As our reputation as a quality-focused documentation company gathered strength, we were increasingly asked to provide project planning, scoping and management services. We had moved from being solely a provider of documentation to a consulting firm, tasked with designing, and then managing, documentation projects.

At this point it was clear that our trading name poorly portrayed what we were doing. Thus in 1994 we changed our name to Abelard Consulting.

The move to recruiting

During the boom of the late 1990s, it became increasingly difficult to find technical writers for our own projects. A torrent of new recruitment agencies had flooded in, but it quickly became clear that few had a good idea of what technical writers did. Thus we opened our own recruitment arm, specialising in technical writing. Based on our extensive experience, we created a face-to-face test-based methodology we could use to easily verify an applicant's claims about their skills and experience.

Our recruitment arm is still going strongly. We are one of only two specialist technical writer recruitment agencies in Australia.

Showing how it is done

With the scarcity of training courses for technical writers, the quality of technical writing in Australia was bound to be somewhat mixed. Anyone could advertise their services as a technical writer and this often led to poor documentation … and poor recruiting decisions by many companies.

In response, Abelard Consulting converted its then 15 years of experience in the technical writing field into a training course for would-be technical writers. This course was delivered Australia-wide (and also in Singapore).

In 2004, the course we developed was taken up by the University of Melbourne, where it is still taught each year. It was also made the basis of a new course—scientific writing—aimed specifically at doctoral students and recently qualified scientists.

In 2019 our training division was acquired by Advanced Technology Testing and Research (ATTAR), who continue to offer our technical and scientific writing courses.

Global reach

Abelard Consulting's reputation has extended beyond the shores of its original home. Although the majority of our clients are Australian-based companies, an increasing portion of our workload now comes from overseas: from China, Taiwan, Korea, New Zealand and the USA.

We are also being increasingly asked by importers to rewrite the user documentation that accompanies the products they import. This is a welcome sign that importers are recognising that purchasers of products have a right to know, without time-wasting trial-and-error, how products they have spent money on work.