Preparing for technical writing jobs and interviews -- posts from Aaron Redshaw
I worked with Aaron while at Amazon. One thing he mentioned to me was that, in my API course, my advice to get experience through an open-source project didn’t work so well. Many people tried volunteering their writing time and talents for these projects, only to be met with silence. Others had trouble even finding a suitable project. Transitioning into tech comm was also a challenge, with many unknowns and open questions.
So I’m glad to see that Aaron has started a series on how to prepare for technical writing jobs and interviews. So far, he has two in-depth articles on how to prepare for technical writing interviews:
And another article on how to get experience:
It seems that this focus (at least for now) for his blog is to provide advice on how to get a job in technical writing. This is great because these kinds of questions are among the most commonly asked in many tech writing forums (such as the /r/technicalwriting subreddit, or on some channels on Write the Docs Slack). I now have some good resources to point writers to.
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I’ll add that Aaron himself has a great online presence with his website. I remember interviewing Aaron, checking out his site, and immediately being impressed. He also presented himself well during interviews. I can see now that he put a lot of time and thought into preparing for those interviews.
About Tom Johnson
I'm an API technical writer based in the Seattle area. On this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, AI, information architecture, content strategy, writing processes, agent skills, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my AI courses for more on the latest in AI and tech comm. If you're looking for info about documenting APIs, see my API documentation course.
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Finally, I want to note a couple of things. I usually write the first drafts of my posts myself and then use AI to improve accuracy, clarity, and detail in places, so my writing is a mix of human and AI. (Hopefully that's not too off-putting.) Also, the opinions I express on my blog are my own perspectives, not those of my employer.