I’m on the job search grind and I haven’t heard back from recruiters in Technical Writing. I got my resume in front of some SDE roles as a backup, but never made it past the first screening. Thats a sign I need to re-evaluate my resume and make sure they know I code for work.
The Black Hole
A career transition from Software Engineering to Technical Writing has resulted in the wrong impression. Recruiters think I can’t code and most likely will not give me a chance when it’s already a tough market. I thank them for their feedback as I create a way to overcome this black hole.
Resume
Starting off, I’ll need to rebuild my resume to focus on being an engineer first, and technical writer second. This is due to the broadness of both roles and how technical writer is a job from before tech. I’ve looked into better ways to accomplish this and settled on making a “hybrid” resume.
Hybrid
My new hybrid resume will escapsulate my work history and skills, but add enough context to determine what skills were used where and emphasize that I code as a technical writer.
Origin of Technical Writing
To understand how this black hole formed, first we need to understand what exactly does it mean when companies say “Technical Writer”. Technical writing started off before the technology hit it’s peak. As a result, it’s misclassified and the degree and experience varies greatly position to position.
Core Functions
At it’s core, a technical writer must be able to communicate high-level concepts to an audience. In-demand skills include personas, communication, and other soft skills.
Tools for writting focus on a text based language: markdown, reST, html, xml, txt.
Modular Functions
As tech began to boom, writing applied to many different domains. Writers could be writing blogs, documentation, or responsible for proposals.
Depending on the docs, programming lanaguge skills are vital to suceed and onboard quickly. But now with Tech, it’s gotten so verbose that all products need yet, but not all writers have the same skills.
My background
I went from a traditional Computer Scienec background, with no course sin Journalism, English, or Literature. As a result, I gained my writing skills through the GEs plus just being American and having to speak English. On top of this, my work as a Technical Writer requires me to be active in communication through speaking not simply writing.
Software Engineering
Even as a software engineer, I’ve had stakeholder and team meetings as part of the Scrum progess that require me to communicate in a simple and understandable way. As you know, not all software engineers understand the same frameworks, even moreso when I’m doing Full-Stack with peers dedicated to frontend or backend. I can’t talk low-level because they’ll get lost after I mention psycopg or webhooks.
The Resume
Combining all these ideas, I began to rewrite my resume with a takeway on specifying what kind of technical writer I am. I needed to begin researching the best way to present myself to all employers.
Layout
After taking some time to reflect on how to craft a resume that leads to technical writing work wirth technical teams working in software engineering, I came across the Hybrid format.
It moves the skills section to the top to highlight my vast technical experience. Then, I’m able to explain my reverse choronological work history as a software engineer building APIs, IoT devices, and dashboards to a transition for more Machine Learning focused writing and code snippets.
Summary
For people trying to skim through the resume, I need to catch their attention with a work summary alongside some metrics and achievements. Many don’t understand that I can code as well as a software engineer from my current resume, and other’s don’t see the value a technical writer can bring.
If I were to describe myself in a few words, I’d use these adjectives.
- Practical
- Curious
- Dilligent
- Realistic
I chose these based on my prefered management style and work-life beliefs. Practical means I go deep into explaining with examples, not simply numbers and equations. It means I can demo if needed and provide proof of concept. Curious highlights my ability to learn, seek out knowledge without any prior direction. Dilligent shows I’m willing to put in the effort and time for what I believe in. Realistic shows my insight towards setting the right goals and deadlines, with an empahsis on reprioritization.
Highlights
I’ve worked at 2 companies at a techncial writer, so I would focus on my impact there. First is an obvious hook, getting to the top of Google search results. Anyone would relate. Next, is the benefits of a technical writer, I let engineers do what they want to do, code. I take away their time spent writing docs and dealing with customer tickets or support requests. In a way, it’s very similar to being a developer advocate.
Skills
Just like how the world is constantly changing, so are the tools and technologies when working in any technical field. I list my top skills in order of competence and know I’ll pass any technical interview on these specific skills.
From my applications and understanding of the industry, many technical writer applications will always want to see some frontend experience with basic HTML/CSS/JS and a couple frameworks like React and Node.js. Likewise, from my ML expereince the programming language of choice is Python and some relational database query language, like SQL.
After that, depending on the company I can sprinkle in more skills related to APIs or Cloud as their documentation varies.
History
Next is work history. There’s not much to say about this, it’s generally the same as what I had before but I tried to make it clear I still coded in these positions. As a technical writer, I felt it’s mandatory to list my generic job roles, but also list out how I go beyond my job title and tackle challenging coding tasks.
Achievements
I include my Hackathon project to show my love of coding outside of work and the pay off as I had won a Hackathon in the health space with SuppCheck. I made sure to highlight m important contributions to the project in GCP, database parsing, and algorithmic optimizations. I found that hackathon really fun and rewarding.
Education
Last but not least is education, since I’m aiming for early-middle positions, it’s critical I put this at the bottom. Most recruiter’s don’t care about it and everyone I know doesn’t spend a lot of time reading it outside of internship positions, when you generally have little to no experience.
Closing
So with that, I have a new resume. It took about a week to rewrite it and explore different methods. In the future, there are hints of AI being used to generate resumes, but for now to avoid misrepresentation I would stand clear of that.