---
title: "Preparing for technical writing jobs and interviews – posts from Aaron Redshaw"
date: 2022-03-07
description: "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..."
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/blog/technical-writing-jobs-and-interviews/index.html
---

> For AI agents: a documentation index is available at https://idratherbewriting.com/llms.txt. Markdown versions of all pages are available by appending .md to any page URL.

# Preparing for technical writing jobs and interviews – posts from Aaron Redshaw

> If you're preparing for a technical writing interview, or looking to get experience to better qualify yourself for the tech comm job market, check out this helpful advice from my former colleague, Aaron Redshaw.

I worked with Aaron while at Amazon. One thing he mentioned to me was that, in my [API course](https://idratherbewriting.com/learnapidoc/), my advice to [get experience through an open-source project](https://idratherbewriting.com/learnapidoc/docapis_find_open_source_project.html) 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:

- [The technical writing interview – Part 1](https://www.aaronkredshaw.com/blog/the-technical-writing-interview-part-1/)
- [The technical writing interview – Part 2](https://www.aaronkredshaw.com/blog/the-technical-writing-interview-part-2/)

And another article on how to get experience:

- [Getting experience – Part 1](https://www.aaronkredshaw.com/blog/getting-experience-part-1/)

It seems that this focus (at least for now) for his [blog](https://aaronkredshaw.com/) is to provide advice on how to [get a job in technical writing](https://aaronkredshaw.com/blog/what-kind-of-technical-writing-job-should-i-get-into/). This is great because these kinds of questions are among the most commonly asked in many tech writing forums (such as the [/r/technicalwriting](https://www.reddit.com/r/technicalwriting/) subreddit, or on some channels on [Write the Docs Slack](https://www.writethedocs.org/slack/)). I now have some good resources to point writers to.

I’ll add that Aaron himself has a great online presence with [his website](https://aaronkredshaw.com/). 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.