6 posts tagged with "Career"

When hiring a technical writer not everybody searches for the same skill set. Choosing the right candidate is often more complex than simply finding somebody to deliver the currently pressing tasks.

It's fine to look for the particular skill set for the specific task, but it does point to a lack of foresight. How the role might evolve in the future, if the scope will change, or whether it will shift more towards leading and hiring others.

I find it helpful to keep a mental model of specializations within the discipline of technical writing. This helps in getting the core capabilities that most or all of these sub-specializations need to possess, so you can then test for them during the hiring process.

You can:

1. Let it fester inside and slowly kill you. Be a man, grit your teeth and take it.
2. Frantically search for jobs at all times until your checking of LinkedIn turns into therapy through social media every time you have a bad experience at work.
3. Change the paradigm. Stop expecting a tap on the back when you think you did your job well. They probably don't even think about whether you did or did not do anything.

You reading these blogs already shows initiative. To learn, to grow.

Already excellent—not everybody has it by nature. Some of us had to be coerced into being ambitious or wanting more.

I am firm believer that most people do not yearn for yachts and walks of fame—just stability and peace of mind. I know I do, but to the natural builders—all the admiration and appreciation, you make the world move. I think I ended up as one of you due to education, necessity, and a little bit chance.

Now that this is out of the way, let's address the AI-generated elephant in the room. Job searches have become an incessant, shameless, self-promoting part-time jobs. Full-time even.

Leadership is an exercise in endurance. Not physical—emotional. You unify the vision, translate different perspectives into a single narrative, and you do not flinch when that narrative gets challenged. You know when to push and when to say no. That is the job.

As anybody who has done it even a little bit will tell you: technical writing is mostly—not writing.

While every company has its own definitions of skills, responsibilities, and expectations it is important to understand that there are also different dimensions of these definitions. You could be looking at pure technical competencies but the position is a leadership one. In which case, you are more akin to an engineering manager than what is usually referred to as an individual contributor.

In both of those cases, it's good to have a handy resource with general, or even very specific, guidelines as to what different levels of an individually-contributing technical writer mean. Whether you manage people or are looking to take charge of your own career, the levels below cover most of the technical writing career ladder.

Adam Savage once said that as a hobbyist, you should buy the cheapest tools you can find and use them until they break. When they break, and they will, you'll know two things: you're serious about the craft, and you now know exactly what you need. Then you buy the best tools you can afford.

This translates beautifully to technical writing.