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.