Re: Career-changer portfolio questions (plus one additional question)

["Janet M. Swisher" <swisher -at- enthought -dot- com>]

ethanreese -at- hotmail -dot- com wrote:

> I am a career-changer that is looking to get into technical writing. 
I've
> been an environmental consultant for five years. I have an M.S. in
> hydrogeology. While that's not exactly related to a lot of fields that
> many tech writers seem to be in,

True, but don't assume that tech writing == product documentation. A 
natural transition for you might be to work as a tech writer for a 
government environmental agency.

> I'm facing the typical career-changer task of preparing a portfolio. 
I am
> thinking of including:
>
> 1) Sections from my thesis - including some of my custom figures made
> Macromedia Freehand 8 and Paint Shop Pro
>
> 2) User documentation I would write for a freeware program I use to
> calculate the volume of fuel/oil in underground storage tanks (it
> currently has no user documentation)
>
> 3) Some pages I would be rewriting from the manual to my MP3 player.

> That's about all I can really think of, other than using some of the
> documents I generate at work (with appropriate changes so clients aren't
> identified and such). How do these sound? Any other ideas?

Given my suggestion of working for a government agency, reports you've 
written for work might be appropriate. Take a look  at publications 
produced by national, state, and local agencies, and see what you can 
infer about their target audience. Try taking a report you wrote for a 
"technical" audience, and rewriting it for a similar audience to that of 
the government publications. (For example, a booklet I reviewed for an 
STC competition was aimed at helping business owners understand and meet 
environmental reporting requirements.)

> My additional question was related to the international market and tech
> writing. I'm currently studying Japanese and Chinese with more emphasis
> on Japanese. Does anyone have thoughts regarding the global market and
> which of those languages might prove more useful in the tech writing
> industry?

Of course, it depends (on the industry, technology, market segment, and 
particular company and product). In general, China is the bigger 
potential market and only getting bigger. Of the major dialects, I 
believe Mandarin is more widely spoken than Cantonese. In a recent 
contract job at a multinational company, I dealt with engineers in both 
mainland China (Mandarin speaking) and Hong Kong (Cantonese speaking). 
The Hong Kong engineers were more fluent in English than their mainland 
counterparts, thanks to the history of British colonialism.

--
Janet Swisher --- Senior Technical Writer
Enthought, Inc. http://www.enthought.com



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