RE: Experience = skill? (was various other threads)

[Christine -dot- Anameier -at- seagate -dot- com]

Jennifer Rondeau described her situation along these lines:
* a recovering academic, from a humanities field
* good teaching and writing skills
* facing others' skepticism regarding her technical abilities
* brief stint in marketing

Jennifer, you wouldn't be my evil twin, would you? <g>  Our backgrounds
sound extremely similar. Seriously, I went into tech writing after five
years in grad school (English) and 18 months of advertising copywriting. I
ran into some roadblocks early on because of the technical issue too; my
resume had "English major" written all over it. What probably saved me was
this: when I took the advertising job, I made an offhand comment about
being a computer geek. When the ad agency hit a budget crisis a year later,
they fired the entire IT staff of two and made me the de facto network
administrator and tech support guru (in addition to my other duties)
because I was the only computer-literate person left in the place. It was
me and a waist-high stack of Netware manuals, and the cellphone number of
an external consultant we brought in for the stuff I couldn't handle on my
own. I made sure to highlight this in my resume.

As a techie you may have had similar experiences, whether you actually had
to maintain a network or you just did informal coaching and tech support
for your peers. If you did any of that stuff, put it on your resume. Have a
few significant anecdotes in mind for interviews. Once you have a few years
of TW experience, the skepticism will probably fade.

The other piece of advice I can offer is this: speak and write in simple,
clear, direct language. Early on I found that people were predisposed to
view me as an egghead. The popular perception is that ivory-tower types
can't communicate well with everyday people. I had to compensate by being
more down-to-earth.

Christine


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