Hello Tom,

I am very interested in making a career change to technical writing and wanted a bit more information on the career field.  You seem pretty knowledgeable and passionate about the career by the looks of your blog posts, so I was hoping you wouldn’t mind me bugging you about it.

I have a bachelor’s in business with an information systems concentration and have experience working and writing professionally (training materials, newsletters, things like that).  I want to take some courses in technical writing or do a certificate program though to bulk up my writing skill and make me more of an asset.  I wanted to know how much which program you attend matters.  I live in NYC and there is a really solid looking, affordable online program offered by a local college and was hoping that would be sufficient.

Finally, it would be nice to speak with someone who is a technical writer and find out what the job is really like.

I apologize for the barrage of questions but really am seriously considering this career and would like to know as much about it as possible so that I may make the most informed decision possible.  Thank you so much in advance for your time and assistance.  I look forward to your reply.

Kind Regards,

Cedric

Response from Bill Albing

Cedric,

I think it’s great that you are considering tech writing as a career.  Here are some points to consider.

The best way to find fellow technical writers is to find a local chapter of our biggest professional association — STC (Society for Technical Communication) http://www.stc.org. Or other groups like ACM SIGDOC,  UX (user experience) or UI (user interface) groups, or training or editing groups, etc.

Also, find people online — use Twitter and Linked in to connect to others. Start with me and the people who follow me and the people I follow. The STC New York Metro Chapter is one possibility (President:  John Posada, +1 (732) 259-2874 jposada99@gmail.com,  Web site:  www.stcnymetro.org).  Find Scott Abel (http://thecontentwrangler.com/) and Anne Gentle (http://justwriteclick.com/).

Every one of us does different work, so you’ll get a different answer from each of us about what tech writers do. But we have a common bond of a commitment to the audience and getting the information to them that they need. I work in software documentation and my background is computers and electronics, but my audience is not mainstream users.

Others work in pharmaceutical/biomed; others work in government or for non-profits. There are different industries and different types of technologies. There are different levels of business, from the factory floor to the CEO, each with different tech writing challenges. Some work online, others publish books. We often start with contract work until we gain an expertise and decide on a career path — some like contracting, some like full-time, some like owning their own business. Here’s a cute little article about breaking into the field.

Your credentials are fine. Your business degree with a concentration in info systems is great. Getting more degrees and more academic training is not necessarily going to help. What they teach in academia (especially if in an English department) is not necessarily useful in the business world. What I mean is that having a Masters in English won’t necessarily make you a better technical writer.

For example, you can’t learn some things from an academic course, such as how to work with limited resources, what are the variables that must be considered, how to get information from experts, how to structure information for multiple audiences — these types of things. Your experience with training materials is valuable; your work on real projects is as much a credential as anything academic. Creating a portfolio of your work is a good idea at any stage of your career.

The field is changing drastically — from big doc departments of writers downsizing and more work moving to lone writers and customer-generated docs. In all honesty, STC has been dropping in membership for the last few years. This may be because traditional tech writing careers are changing and no one does just technical writing anymore. Or it may be because STC as an organization isn’t changing with the times, I don’t know. It could be both. But many of my colleagues have different titles now, wear more than one hat, are working more online than previously, and may or may not have time for STC anymore.

Tech writing is a balance of knowing your technical stuff and being able to write about it (communicate it). Neither skill is more important than the other. If you can’t balance both then you’re either a techno-geek or you’re a writer. For those of us who feel called to do both, and it sounds like you are, then do both! My motto has always been, just do it. There are plenty of opportunities to find work, despite the doom and gloom predictions about the economy. The job market is not shrinking — it’s changing. The traditional jobs are shrinking. Look on Indeed.com for jobs — not just technical writing, but also other titles. See:

• Content Strategist
• Information Management
• Information Architect
• Information Developer
• Technical Writer
• Technical Documentation
• Documentation Manger
• Content Management
• Business Analyst

Here’s an example list.

Hope that helps. Feel free to contact me anytime with questions or if you’d like encouragement.

–Bill Albing
volunteer:
Principal Information Architect, KeyContent.org
bill.albing@keycontent.org

day job:
Senior Information Architect, Paragon Application Systems, Inc.

Response from Alyssa Fox

Cedric,

Bill did a great job summarizing some points to think about below, so I’ll just piggyback off his. 

First of all, let me say that your prior experience with training materials and newsletters will be a strength in breaking into this field due to the fact that you know how to communicate information to the audience you’re writing for. Same thing with tech writing — it’s just usually a technical audience. Your business background will also help, no matter which industry you end up in.

As Bill mentioned, you can do tech writing in several fields. I’m based in Houston and in software development, but besides software, the other 2 biggies here in town are oil/gas and medical writing. I love software, and you get the opportunity at some places to contribute to user experience, usability, product design, etc. as well as “just writing doc.”

As a hiring manager, I am much more interested in your ability to take complex information and make it easily understood than I am by any program you’ve completed or certification you might have gotten. Most of what you need to know to be a successful tech writer cannot be taught in a program like that — things such as great communication so you can interview subject matter experts, the ability to present information in a logical organized format, how to work on multiple projects at once and stay sane, etc. The kinds of things you’ve done in your career already usually tell me more about your abilities than a tech writing program.

Finally, I agree with Bill that the industry is changing. We don’t just write documentation. We develop processes, we help design our products, we help code our projects, we create multimedia tutorials, we blog, we improve user experience, we manage projects, we conduct usability testing, we help develop and refine requirements, we create content strategies across functional departments. There really are a world of opportunities in tech writing right now.

Hope this helps, and if you have further questions, I’d be happy to help out. Good luck to you!

Alyssa Fox
Information Development Manager, NetIQ
STC Houston incoming president

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It seems that we’re sharing everything these days — what we read, listen to, who we are, what we do. In this post I provide a little technical writer how-to on these topics.

Sharing Your Google Reader Blogroll

To add a Google Reader blogroll to your site:

1. Go to google.com/reader, log into your Google account, and click Settings in the upper-right corner.

(By the way, as far as feedreaders go, nothing can compare with Google Reader.)

2. Go to the Tags tab.

You’ll notice that your tags are basically your folders. I have my feeds grouped into different folders/tags.

3. Click the gray public/private icon to make your tag/folder public. The icon turns orange .

4. Click the add a clip to your site link.

5. In the window that pops up, copy the javascript code (after selecting the color style you want).

6. Insert the code into a page of your blog. (When inserting code, it’s best to switch to the code view of any editor you have.) If you use Blogger, it’s even easier to add the code.

Voila, your Google Reader feed is magically integrated into your site.

Podroll

My “Podroll” (list of podcast feeds I listen to) is just a group of feeds tagged as podcasts. Still, I’d love to find other podrolls out there.

Sharing Your Pandora Feed

First, a little bit about Pandora. I listen to Pandora pretty frequently. The music is free, commercial free, and it has a good selection. You just type an artist or song you like, and it plays similar songs from a database of music with similar tags. For example, type “Leaving Las Vegas” and you’ll get a decent station. You can even give songs a thumbs up or down, and it tries to learn what you like.

But beyond simply listening to music online, you can share your bookmarked music feed with others.

Here’s how you share your Pandora bookmarked feed:

1. Go to Pandora.com and create an account.

2. When you hear a song you like, move your mouse over the graphic and click the triangle.

3. Select what you want to bookmark — the artist, song, or something else.

The bookmarked song is added to your Pandora page, which has its own feed. The URL for your bookmarked page is what appears in your web browser.

Readers can subscribe to your feed by clicking the standard RSS feed icon, as shown in the image below.

By the way, another great music site similar to Pandora is Last.fm.

Sharing Google Reader Items

While we’re on the topic of sharing, let’s go back to Google Reader. With Google Reader, you can tag and share posts you like. This leads to the concept of human-based aggregation, which is incredibly efficient for finding good content to read. You don’t have to sort through thousands of feeds to find several worthwhile nuggets. Instead, you have a handful of people sifting through their feeds, doing the work for you. (I posted a video of Robert Scoble sifting through 622 feeds a while ago.)

Here’s how you share items you like from your Google Reader:

1. Click the Share button under a post you like.

(Usable Help from Gordon Meyer, by the way, is an excellent blog.)

2. Click the Your shared items link in the upper-left to see your shared items page.

Note: As a bonus, if your Gmail contacts mark posts from their Google Reader as shared, you automatically see their shared feeds under a “Friends’ Shared Items” section in your Google Reader. As you can see, Heidi Hansen has a shared Google feed. And if you add me as a Gmail contact (tomjohnson1492@gmail.com), you’ll see my Shared feeds too.

3. Your shared items are aggregated into a feed of their own, which people can subscribe to.

Here’s my Google Shared Items page. My only complaint is that sharing a post doesn’t seem to ping the author with a notification that I’ve marked his or her post.

(By the way, the Google Reader team has a worthwhile blog at http://googlereader.blogspot.com/.)

Sharing Your Professional Resume

By now you’re thinking, what else can I share? Yes, there’s more. What list would be incomplete without Linkedin? Every now and then people ask for my Linkedin page, so here it is: Tom Johnson on Linkedin.

If you want, send me an invitation to connect with your network. I only have 21 connections, and I think to be cool you need at least several hundred.

Sharing Your Time with Google Chat

I’m not huge into IM, but I get a lot of people asking me if I have a gmail address because they want to add me to their list of contacts that they can do Google Chat with. (My gmail address is, by the way, tomjohnson1492@gmail.com if you want to add me as a contact.)

To add a contact to your gmail:

1. Click the Contacts link in the left pane.

2. Click the Add Contact button and add the contact.

Once you have a list of contacts, you can initiate a chat session with any of them by clicking the green circle next to their name. Here’s my wife’s cousin below — he’s a genius with translation of technical material.

Clicking the green circle opens a popup instant message window in the lower-right corner of your screen. It’s a nice way to make exchanges more efficient and stop going back and forth with email.

The color of the circle shows one’s availability.

Sharing Other Things

You can share almost anything online today. Here are a few more things you can share:

• Shelfari allows you to share a virtual bookshelf.
• Slideshare allows you to share Powerpoints presentations you’ve given (here’s Bill Albing’s Slideshare page).
• Confabb allows you to share conferences you’ve attended and your reviews of the sessions (For example, here’s Scott Abel’s confabb page).

I purposely excluded Twitter because I’ve never seen the appeal.

What am I missing from this list (that you actually use)?

Implications

As Bill Albing said in the last podcast, we’re moving toward a shared network model, where people publish and subscribe. The really appealing sites integrate feeds for a community of users in an invisible, seamless way, making it easy to see what we’re all up to. As for privacy, it doesn’t seem that much of a concern.

Download MP3
Duration: 27 min.

In this podcast, I talk with Bill Albing, founder of KeyContent.org, about the impact of social media on technical communication. Bill talks about different ways social media helps audiences interconnect and interact. Good social media technologies enable professionals to collaborate easily, without being encumbered by complicated technology or even burdened by managing and filtering feeds.

Bill explains that the web is more than just a venue for publication — it’s a medium that allows people to interconnect and work/collaborate with information. This is the direction we’re moving towards, and technical communicators are starting to integrate social media, such as user forums, directly into their help.

Resources Mentioned in the Podcast

• Keycontent.org
• KeyContent blog
• Naymz
• Bill on Naymz
• Facebook
• Linked in
• Content Wrangler LinkedIn
• Last.fm
• Myspace
• Amazon
• Tikiwiki
• Flickr
• Secondlife
• Flare’s online help file with Feedback server
• My instructions for installing mediawiki
• Yahoo pipes
• Joann hackos’ blog
• Ann rockley’s blog
• Neil perlin’s blog
• Alan houser’s blog
• Bill’s slideshares on social media
• Slideshare

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