Re: Experience/No experience

[Johanna <chazjo -at- magma -dot- ca>]

Christine made the good point that she: "...would not
advise aspiring tech writers to enter the field
through clerical temp work. Once a company has had you
collating their binders and typing their memos, I
think it's hard for them to envision you in a
non-clerical position."

However.... in one of the doc groups I worked with,
they hired a temp from Manpower to do some Frame work
and help out with doc conversions. She also did other
bits and ends but she was quite enthuastic about it.
She had no tech writing experience but made a point of
attending all the doc meetings and asking the manager
and writers if there was anything else she could help
with. Eventually she was given things such as the
glossary and some indexing chores.

When the group posted up an internal req for a senior
tech writer, she was encouraged by other writers to
put her name in. Although she had no background in
tech writing, just a BA in English and a year of
teacher's college, they took her on as a junior tech
writer and assigned a senior resource as her mentor.
As far as I know she is still with Nortel today.

My two cents,
Johanna


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