A colleague joined me for technical writing from yesterday. She recently gets pregnant and then transferred from tester team since exposure to lab radiation is considered a risk for her baby. Before that, she had worked as technical writer and configuration manager. Now she is back on the old track she gave up two years ago.
Recently I am thinking about the prospect of technical writer. I have seen people entering and quitting this career; some of them quit but resume after a year's stumbling and probing. Of course there are people who eventually manage their new professions like office administration and configuration management, however few gains prominent recognition and respect in their new roles.
The reason is just simple, if people are reluctant to leave the comfortable zone in technical communication, they are not likely to succeed with a simple job change. Many technical writers rarely do extensive study into products and technologies beyond documentation scope. Perhaps technical writing is easy to start with and faces less competition and challenges from other partitioners at the very beginning, but this is an illusion and make writers lost in routines. Many writers follow a conventional development approach: start as junior tech writer from various education backgrounds, get promoted to senior tech writer after reaching five to eight years, then look inside or out for tech pub manager title as the destination stop. If they finally get the title, they try to keep it till retirement. Unfortunately, since tech pub manager roles are rarely outsourced to China, the "senior" tech writers usually have to endure frozen salary, if they have not paved a way out of the odds.
One thing that is usually neglected by technical writers is, writing is just part of communication. Technical communication includes various functions like customer and market communication, content management, instruction design, web design and so on. The situation is, the number of technical writer keeps increasing with the outsourcing demands, whereas other jobs like information architect, content strategist are rarely open in China. However, this does not means no opportunity at all. Various methods have been and are being developed for effective communication, which means there is always room to improve current information design. But finally, it always depends on writer's own decision on whether to stay at current comfortable zone or to venture into the unknown field. Such decision definitely draws distinct career paths.
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