Office Hours 21 June 2024: Get hired as a technical author

Community Open Documentation Academy
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Get hired as a technical author.

Here are the slides: Tips for getting hired as a technical author.

Massive thank you to @akonev for putting this together presentation together, and for hosting the session.

00:05 Welcome
00:10 Updates
01:04 A few new tasks
03:10 Presentation starts
03:30 Outline
03:50 Prerequisites: come prepared
04:05 Skills: writing
05:20 Skills: technology and tools
07:10 Attitude: it’s bad out there
08:10 Attitude: personality
09:10 Attitude: the silver lining
10:10 Portfolio: choosing samples
11:10 Portfolio: be ready to talk about writing
12:30 Community involvement
13:10 General approach to applications
14:02 Down the hiring funnel: set your priorities
16:15 Down the hiring funnel: talking to people
18:45 Written submissions: tailoring
20:45 Written submissions: attitude
22:00 Research and preparation
23:50 Interviewing
26:41 Example of a technical writing career journey
28:40 Question: what’s the best way to showcase contributions?
34:10 Question: how technical do you need to be?
36:45 Question: how can you quantify the impact you have through documentation?
39:40 Question: how do you decide if you’re qualified for a role?
41:50 Question: is there much room for creativity in technical writing?
44:40 Question: what kind of tests might you face during hiring?
47:40 Question: when is the best time to start applying?

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Hello @degville degville. I guess you made a mistake with the date. I believe it should be 24th of June and not 21st

Excellent presentation by the way.

[Edit: I got it mixed up :slightly_smiling_face:
Never mind]

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No problem! I’ve actually published an entire video with the wrong date at the beginning, which I then had to delete and re-redit!

It may be clearer if I start adding when the recordings were made.

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Hi @degville! :slight_smile: I requested access to the slides presentation.

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Hello! I’m really sorry - I didn’t realise they weren’t accessible outside our organisation. I’ve created a PDF of the slide deck and swapped the link with a link to the PDF. Hope that’s ok!

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