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Technical Writing Careers

Every technical writer needs a grounding in getting started in this thriving profession. These features and how-to articles provide insight on traveling the career path, as well as tools and strategies for landing the job, advancing in the organization, and building skills.

I need a new Technical Writing Job: New Roles on Tech Comm Jobs

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It's Saturday morning and you woke up on a cold sweat because it's less than 48 hours before you need to return to The Office. The coffee is made and the [insert critter] has been let out. Then it hits you - gosh darn it I need a new job in technical writing. Why? Money, fame, or a boss that you swear Scott Adams models Dilbert's Pointy-Haired Boss after. Regardless, you're tired of working for a company whose motto has to be "Be Evil" so in light of this new found wisdom, here are TechWhirl's latest job listings from our still maturing and developing jobs site (Tech Comm Jobs). Read more of this technical writing article »

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Technical Communications Juggler: Balancing Work, Life and Writing Books

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It's a hard slog writing technical books, especially when juggling a full-time technical communications job and the usual set of family responsibilities. Structure and discipline are the keys to success. Here are some guidelines based on hard-won experience, to balancing the technical communications work, the personal life and the book writing dream. Read more of this technical writing article »

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Network Your Way to a Paycheck

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If you’re a student or a recent grad, you may believe that you don’t know anyone who can help you get into the workplace. However, even as a student in an online course, you can take advantage of relationships built in the online classroom to get your foot in the door for good technical communications positions. Read more of this technical writing article »

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To Tweet or Not to Tweet? Effective Networking with Twitter

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What value could Twitter possibly add to your technical communications career? If you are not a Twitter user, you might think that Twitter is not interesting enough for you to bother with. If you are Twitter user, you might think that Twitter is entertaining, but it is basically full of useless information and that it definitely has no value as a professional networking tool. Until recently, as a casual Twitter user, my opinion of Twitter was a mix of the previous two viewpoints; however, this changed Read more of this technical writing article »

Everything I Need to Know As a Technical Writer I Learned In High School

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Not many of us started off here. Although it seems that the field has been growing steadily for twenty years, there haven’t historically been a lot of technical writing programs, and thus most technical writers began their professional lives as…something else. Of the technical writers I heard from, only four had been through a dedicated [...] Read more of this technical writing article »

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Building an NDA-Compliant Portfolio

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At some point in your technical communications career (and probably at most of them), you will be asked to sign a confidentiality or non-disclosure agreement (NDA) before beginning work for an employer or client. Like most professionals, you plan on doing great work, and want to be able to show future employers and clients exactly what kind of technical communications masterpieces you can produce. But you’ve got to sign that NDA, and it’s gnawing at you how you’ll be able to show your capabilities without divulging information that could impact the company that hired you. Read more of this technical writing article »

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This IS Your Dream Job!

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Here are two questions to ask yourself: 1) when are you most content? (Not ‘happy’ per se, since happy moments are fleeting. 2) Does contentment ever happen for you during the workday? The average American worker spends 2080 hours per year on paid work.[1] Over 30 years, that adds up to 62,400 hours. That’s a [...] Read more of this technical writing article »