Technical Writer Jobs

Technorati Tags: content strategy, freelance, Technical Writer Jobs

 

Is it time for a little personal rebranding? If your current job title is “technical writer” and you are seeking work in the Web agency world, you might want to make some adjustments. My experience has been that hiring managers in trendy Web design firms have very little understanding of what technical writer’s jobs are like these days and what they do. Often it’s exactly the same kind of work that their own Web writers perform, just with a different job title.

 

Technical writers get painted with all kinds of negative images that are, for the most part, simply untrue. Agencies tend to want “creative” and “edgy” and have a pre-conceived idea about technical writers in these areas. 

 

This bias is clearly displayed and documented in a post on my content strategy blog where a company listed under job requirements, “No Tech Writers.” How’s that for blunt. I’ve found that it does little good to attack prejudices of any kind head on. If I was in this position and applying for a Web writing job at an agency I’d do two things:

• Adjust my job titles in my resume. If I have done any kind of writing for the Web, I’d list my job title/role as Web Writer/Technical Writer or Web Editor/Technical Editor. For some reason, the title technical editor does not seem to have as much of a negative connotation. I’d still mention technical writing in the longer job description, but I’d try to leave it out of the main heading. One good way to make this change is to change the heading text from “Job Title:” to “Role:’ – this way you can describe the actual work you performed without listing an arbitrary job title.

 

• Then I’d be sure to call out your web writing and editing experience boldly in your cover letter, while not mentioning the term “technical writer.” Hiring managers really do read the cover letters.

 

I’m hoping that this bias against technical writers is not a growing trend. I’ll keep an eye out and report what I find.

Learn more about how I used my technical writer jobs skills get a much higher paying job as a Content Strategist working on Web site development projects.

If you want to be at the cutting edge of technical writer jobs these days it may be time to go Agile.

Agile refers to a software development methodology that is vastly different from the way most large companies write software. No feasibility analysis, no functional specifications – just an agreement on the basic idea and the developers start writing code. The idea is to see what works and to iterate quickly to get to some kind of working prototype as fast as humanly possible. Then throw it out to users and see what happens. They collect user input, and bugs, fix and patch and keep on going.

So how the heck do you write technical documentation in this environment. Well, at first you don’t. The very first versions are usually very basic, and they had better be easy to use. An Agile environment thrives on simplicity. In the Agile Manifesto they put it this way:

“Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential”

At first the technical writer’s job is to do as little documentation as you can get away with. Focus on the interface.

Once things are working a bit better and the product starts to take on some complexity, Agile technical writers usually use a wiki as the documentation platform.

They write and track posts on the wiki and let the users in. The great thing about using a wiki as a documentation platform is that as soon as you write something and hit Save, it is live and every user now has access to it. No publishing documents or compiling Help files.

Here are a couple of pages written by  Agile technical writers talking about how they do things.

http://ffeathers.wordpress.com/2008/01/20/the-agile-technical-writer/

http://www.atlassian.com/agile/people/technical-writer.jsp

So be on the lookout for Agile technical writer jobs. This is where technical writer jobs and careers are heading, so the quicker you get on board, the further ahead you will be.

Learn more about how I used my technical writer jobs skills get a much higher paying job as a Content Strategist working on Web site development projects.

If you need to be in a bad mood for some reason (it could happen) all you need to do is Google the keyword phrase “technical writing outsourcing India.” The flood of pages that are returned offering technical i services from college educated writers, all willing to work at a fraction of what we make in U.S. will make you want to go take a nap.

It seems that technical writing may be the next big profession to be outsourced. India has a surplus of well-trained writers, fluent in English, who are eager for work. And unlike call center operators, the Indian accent is much harder to detect in written software documentation and online help.

Indian is about to have to world’s largest English speaking population, so don’t expect things to get anything but worse.

If you find your company’s technical writing jobs are  being moved off shore, be the first to volunteer to be the editor for them! Even the best companies doing techical writing jobs off shore recommend that you have a native English speaker review and make final edits. This could be a good way to save your job.

Learn more about how I used my technical writer jobs skills get a much higher paying job as a Content Strategist working on Web site development projects.

 

More proof that indeed, the journalists are coming to take technical writer jobs.

 

Here is an article published on Aug 5, 2009 called – Taking Journalism Skills to New Industries that describes just what I’ve been talking about. The writer answers a question from a young journalist who is frustrated with the lack of opportunity in that market and is trying to find a way to use his journalistic skills and experience in another, more profitable, way.

 

Q: “I still want to use my journalism skills, but in a different way…. How can I convince employers that my skills are transferable?”

A: “Look for all kinds of writing jobs: technical, grants, internal communications and public relations. Look for jobs where investigations, information gathering, analysis and synthesis are in demand.”

 

Of course the obvious answer is to look to other, more stable industries. Jobs in technical writing must seem very attractive at this point.

 

So expect more of this kind of competition as the year goes on. Journalists are used to a lower pay scale than technical writers as well so this will likely put downaward pressure on pay rates, at least at the lower end of the scale.

 

Just another reason to think about really specializing, taking your technical writer job skills to the Web, or going freelance.

Learn more about how I used my technical writer jobs skills get a much higher paying job as a Content Strategist working on Web site development projects.

Technorati Tags: competition, journalists, technical writing jobs

When I was a well-paid senior technical writer back in the 1990s, we went through a recession and I found myself without a job. Laid off. Very confident of my skills, I expected to find something right away and I was very surprised when this didn’t happen. Companies would be impressed by my resume, call me in for a great interview, call me back for another interview, and then I’d never hear from them again.

It took a while, but I finally got a clue as to what was going on from a friend who was a manager in a company where I was being considered. The hard truth was that I had priced myself out of the current market. Times were tight and there were plenty of people with OK skills who were eager to take the jobs for much less that what I was used to getting.

I think that this is happening now in the technical writer jobs market. Plus, the problem is being compounded by the collapse of the print media. Journalists of all kinds are fining themselves out on the street and looking for a new place to sell their skills. Technical writing is the first place to try for many with any kind of technical background. Especially those who started out as technical writers and then moved into other areas. They all head back to technical writing and cause the jobs market to get very competitive. This drives full-time salaries down.

Competing in a Tough Technical Writer Jobs Market

There are three ways to compete and win in this kind of market:

1- Beef up your resume, really call attention to skills that you have that may be in short supply, and duke it out for the best jobs.

2 - Lower your compensation expectations and compete on price in the short term until things get better.

3 – Go compete in a different league where things are not as competitive or where the overall pay level is higher.

If you decide to go with door number 3, I think that both the writing for the Web and Content Strategy markets are good choices, as is taking your technical writer jobs skills over into the freelance and contract market. The overall pay and competition are better in the Web writing and content strategy areas and working on contract let’s you apply for jobs all over the world, not just in your backyard.

Technorati Tags: content strategy, Freelance Technical Writer, Technical Writer Jobs