Fwd: Interested in input from managers and individual contributors on hiring newbies

[John G <vwritert -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Hi Krista.

I think I remember your name from a few years back.

I got a job as a customer service rep with absolutely zero experience in
any sort of writing field other than a BA in English and Philosophy and a
job stacking shelves at a bookstore. After showing some aptitude for
helping people on the phone - mostly by reading them the manual -  the tech
pubs manager approached me when one of his writers quit. That was 46 years
ago, but it's the same old story from what I saw in other replies.

I took to tech writing like a duck to water. After making several life-long
friends at my first job, I got the chance to go to DEC which had an
in-house training program where I learned a lot more about writing, and
even more about hardware and software when I started writing operating
systems and utilities guides, and then documenting programming languages.

A couple of jobs later, I was supervising a team of writers documenting
office systems at Wang. One od my colleagues was taking courses at
Harvard's Extention School and had talked to the dean about putting
together a tech doc course. We put together a syllabus and got the
go-ahead. The next year she had moved away and I taught the class for 5
years until I had to quit to take a doc mamager job offer in New Zealand.

Repercussions from the Crash of 1989 saw me back in Boston as Director of
Communications Services for a doc consulting company. After all this, I
missed writing and freelanced, and then managed small doc groups for a few
short-lived startups and a large buyout. I partnered with some friends and
we ran a conference company - anyone remember Help University? - and also
helped manage and run InterChange - the STC Boston regional confernce while
also teaching for 10 years in a tech writing certificate course at UMass
Lowell .

Then about 16 years ago, we moved to a beautiful house with 20 acres of
woods and fields on a dead-end dirt road in Vermont. Worked remotely, found
some local gigs,one of whixh was a portable electonic health record.
Parlayed that into a job at Dartmouth Medical School's regional hopital as
web master for the cancer center and manager of 19 doctors working to
establish a one-size-fits-all UI for an EHR system. After that my  ISP
replaced dialup with gigabit fiber optic and through sn online friend for
decades, I got my current job as a lead wrter for the leading clinical
trials software company. We manage the data for the Moderna vaccine and
other Covid trials and therapeutics.

It's been a good long ride.  Word wrangling and font fondling have been
very, very good to me.

As I used to say to my students in the first class of the semester - As a
tech writer, you get to be Arthur Conan Doyle for a living: you spend half
your time talking to people and following clues to a mystery, and half your
time writing it up for the edification of others.

So, if you're still with me, here's the advice I'd give to inexperienced
job seekers and the people hiring them:

Seekers: Take an entry level job in an industry area that interests you.
Learn as much as you can. Take an intro to tech writing class locally or
online. Find something in your current job thaat needs new or better
written instructions, and write them, then ask whoever in your company is
in charge of documentation if someone could review them and give you some
feedback.

Hirers: If an applicant - or person with gumption like the above Seeker -
appears before you, take the time to assess their intelligence and
curiosity. If they pass muster, give them a chance. At the very least, give
the Seeker some feedback, and keep you eye on them. Hire for attitude,train
for excellence.


On Fri, Mar 19, 2021, 12:53 PM Van Laan, Krista <Krista -dot- VanLaan -at- itron -dot- com>
wrote:

> I am working on the second edition of "The Insider's Guide to Technical
> Writing" and would like to update the section on breaking into the field.
> Job-hunting has changed a lot over the years, and it seems to be harder
> than ever for a new graduate or career-changer to meet real hiring managers
> or get around the impersonal job application software.
>
> For hiring managers: How do you recruit new hires who have no experience?
> What do you look for when hiring someone like this?
>
> For individual contributors who have started within the last ten years:
> How did you find your first job?
>
> Krista Van Laan
>
>
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