Technical Writer

I have been a technical writer for a long time now. When I started there were no technical writing qualifications. The only requirement was that you had a degree of some sort, and even that wasn’t really compulsory. I know some technical writers who came up through clerical roles. Others, like me, are former programmers. A lot of them are trainers who decided that they could write better training manuals than the ones that were forced on them. Some people, like me again, deliberately choose to become technical writers, while a large percentage seem to fall into the role.

And as for courses on technical writing, there was nothing.

One of our local universities now offers a post-graduate certificate/diploma in technical communicaton.

I am glad they made it a post-graduate course though, because one of the things that really helps a technical writer when they are starting out is experience. The experience of user who knows the business processes behind a system they have used day in and day out, the experience of a trainer who knows what it is like to get up in front of a group of adults and use materials that someone else has written, even the experience of a developer who has written code for a system and can understand some of the more obtuse technical talk. You don’t get that experience straight out of school.

That doesn’t mean someone whose first job out of school is as a technical writer will be bad at it. There are good writers everywhere.

It doesn’t mean that technical writers are the only one with this problem either. An engineer or an accountant straight out of university is the same, and they all—engineers, accountants and technical writers—go on to gain experience. But until now, we haven’t had inexperienced tech writers. Almost without exception they have come from other fields first.

I am noticing more job advertisements for technical writers that specify some form of writing degree as the main qualification required. I also notice that undergraduate writing courses now often have a technical writing component, and that the institutions that run them are more open to, and pushing, technical writing as a potential career for writers.

I wonder how long it will be before we start insisting that technical writers must have a writing degree. An undergraduate writing degree.