Re: senior writer promotion

Subject: Re: senior writer promotion
From: Kevin McLauchlan <kmclauchlan -at- chrysalis-its -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2002 12:53:41 -0400


On Thursday 10 October 2002 10:41, Joe Campo wrote:
> I could not find any info in the 2001/2002 archives on
> this, so I am posting this.
>
> Can writers with the title "senior writer" give details
> about how they received this title?
> What were the qualifications used to grant you this
> title? Did you have to pass some exam, or was your
> performance rated against established parameters?
> Did you have to be a writer for X number of years?
> Was it just a title promotion?
> or
> Did you receive a salary increase, and if yes, what
> percentage?

I'm not entirely sure why I have the title, but that's
what appears on my job description. It's the label
they put on me when I came to this company 4-1/2
years ago. Not sure if HR took it out of a book,
or if the Veep of Engineering who hired me just
thought it sounded nice. :-)

The salary increased, but only incidentally. I came
to this company when the wife and I decided to
emigrate from Montreal to Canada in 1998. ;->

I am a one-man customer documentation crew,
meaning that I'm responsible for the guts of the
customer documentation, from start to release,
and all maintenance.
The graphic designer guy does the covers, but
every other aspect is mine. Mine, I say.

I don't always have final decision power as to
what will be produced, because I'm satisfying
customers, in-house and out-house <g>, but
what usually happens is that I end up telling them
what it is they want, and then giving them what
I told them they wanted.

I negotiate schedules and revise them as
conditions change.

I have supervised others, in the past, but never
actually managed them for extended periods.

A novice would be totally lost, and a junior
would turn into an intermediate by taking over
my job. On the other hand, I basically created
my job, just as I did in at least one previous gig.
However, I'm in a niche that currently
does not involve any online help and not much
html stuff. In a sense, I think that makes me
not well rounded enough to be truly a "senior"
writer.

On the other hand, I could step into almost
any situation and start creating usable documents
for the client. I say "almost" because I'd be as
overwhelmed as anybody if the industry was totally
new to me and I didn't have time to get my bearings.
But given a project-span of months, rather than days,
I have no doubt about my capabilities.

If somebody tossed a set of jet-liner blue-prints,
or the design specs of a nuclear plant in front of me,
I'd do a fair bit of slow blinking before I started making
coherent noises, but I'd eventually make sense of
them and start writing docs for techs or pilots or
whatever... but not before pestering a lot of engineers
and techs and mechanics, and getting my hands dirty,
to find out what they really need.

I've never had formal training, and never taken an
exam or certification of any kind in "Tech Writing"
or whatever. My education was electronics, when
the early microprocessors were being turned into
whiz-bang devices like the IBM PC... woohoo.
But I read about all sorts of obscure stuff and other
disciplines, and am not limited to that niche. I'm a
generalist. I have no medical training, but I can hold
my head above water when reading pubs like the Lancet
or the New England Journal of Medicine, and I'm
considerably further up the curve on nutrition than most
doctors.

I'm not a math or statistics whiz, but I know enough
to get uncomfortable when people are bending or
misreading data and statistical derivations. But then,
I still buy lottery tickets... go figure.

Give me 14 pounds of nicely refined plutonium, and I'll
reduce your neighborhood to radioactive slag (I might need
to borrow a pinch of TNT to get it started...). I've been
through the mill of ISO-9000 (I was part of the
working committee that made it happen for Ericsson
in Montreal). I've done some instructing. I've been service
support for one of the big consumer-electronics giants,
back when they had a computer division.

I'm not the most intelligent person you've
ever met, but I'm fairly bright and.... interested.
I thrive on learning things and communicating
them to other people, and I've had many years of
practice in group and one-man-band settings.
I am not a "business-man", per se, but I know
how businesses work, how products are developed,
how regulatory compliance works, and I've had a bit
of exposure to co-ordinating translation/localization
(though not in recent years).

Senior writer? You tell me. What IS that, anyway?

Um, I'll turn 50 in another year-and-a-bit... does that
count?

/kevin


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References:
senior writer promotion: From: Joe Campo

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