RE: Career paths for tech writers (was Big bucks in tech writing)

["HALL Bill" <bill -dot- hall -at- tenix -dot- com>]

Bruce Byfield asked, "How many people are content with being a technical writer? Do people see themselves as being tech-writers for the rest of their working lives? Or do they hope to move into another field or into management? If they do plan to move away from technical writing, what do they plan to do next? Ultimately?"

Good technical writers distil and transform data, information and implicit knowledge about complex things or processes into explicit and transferable knowledge that contributes to a corporate memory and presence. Given that the writing task is adjacent to many crucial areas of corporate performance, by observing what is going on around and preparing yourself intellectually, there may be many opportunities to branch into other interesting areas where corporate knowledge is generated, managed or disseminated.

As I have found in my own career, technical writing allowed me to move simultaneously into areas of management, analysis and design of documentation systems and areas of corporate knowledge management. I still do a lot of writing, by much of it is now directed towards organisational change, to improve our generation, management and delivery of corporate knowledge. I am a direct report to the cross-divisional general manager level in a role somewhat akin to being a chief knowledge officer (when the company gets to the point where it decides one is needed). It has also led to an appointment as honorary research fellow in the Knowledge Management Lab in Monash University's School of Information Management and Systems, which offers the option of an academic career path if I tire of the commercial world.

In the last 20 years I have worked for three organisations (a small commercial software house, a small-medium bank that became the retail front for one of the big three banks, and Australia's largest defence prime contractor). For each of these I started as a technical writer and ended up managing or at least working with the entire corporate documentation systems and processes in one way or another. 

Given that my training was in evolutionary biology, I have absolutely no formal qualifications for anything I am doing now. All it takes to access such careers, besides understanding the cognitive process that make you a good technical writer, is a broad interest, a deep curiosity about how things work, and a motivation to make them work better. 

I am sure such paths should be available to others in the tech writing arena if you are interested and motivated.

Bill Hall
Documentation Systems Analyst
Strategy and Development Group
Tenix Defence
Nelson House, Nelson Place
Williamstown, Vic. 3016
Australia
Tel: +61 3 9244 4820 (Direct)
     +61 3 9244 4986 (Office)
URL: http://www.tenix.com
Mailto:bill -dot- hall -at- tenix -dot- com
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