Thomas Barker specializes in software documentation and is author of Writing Software Documentation (Allyn & Bacon, 2003). An Associate Fellow in STC, he was Manager of the Consultants and Independent Contractor SIG from 1997 to 2002. He currently serves as Manager of the STC Academic Community and is Director of Technical Communication Program at Texas Tech University. He was awarded the Jay Gould Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2004.
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Technical communicators often see themselves as boundary spanners in the organizations in which they work. And the nature of technical communication lends itself to this view. Technical communicators interact with persons in different departments, getting technical information here, marketing information there, coordinating document production with product releases, and so on. They also span the boundary between user and product, designing technical information in ways that allow for efficient and effective use. Finally, they span the conceptual boundary between the highly technical and the non–technical, translating from one discourse to another as part of their every day work. Technical writers get good at being effective in more than one world.
Technical communicators in education share a similar view of themselves. While they work primarily in an academic setting, they associate frequently with technical communicators in industry. They span the boundary between students and the students’ future employment, between the principles of writing, document design, graphics design, and documentation management in the classroom and the practices of writing, designing, and management in the workplace.
In particular, teachers of specialized courses, such as software or hardware documentation in universities and colleges, find themselves confronted with a need to know the realities of the workplace. You have to keep up with tools and practices of industry professionals, you need to identify characteristics of successful technical communication professionals to pass along to students, you need to maintain employment contacts for students, and you need to meet the demands of employers who are looking for employees or interns. You can not do this without amassing some body of knowledge and experience in workplace technical writing. This boundary spanning among technical writing teachers sets them apart from other academics in composition programs and in English departments, where many of them are located. When I look around the halls in the Department of English at Texas Tech University, I see lots of people who do not have the opportunity to interact with business professionals, or who do, but in a different capacity.
But I do have the opportunity, and I’m the kind of person who likes to take advantage of opportunities, both to supplement my income and for the career growth and professional development — a concern for all technical writing teachers. The kind of work a technical writing teacher finds him or herself doing brings many opportunities to take on a project or spend some time doing professional technical communication work.
When I write about doing professional technical communication work, I mean independent work primarily, working as a consultant or independent contractor. I know of others who have not worked independently, choosing to work for a documentation company, like WritePoint, Inc.; a software company, like CA; or a contract company or agency, like Writing Assistance, Inc. However, I went the independent route. The experiences that I am basing this chapter on come from my doing projects for local computer companies in Lubbock, TX, and my experience as an independent contractor in Long Island, New York in 1995. My focus will be on my decision to do independent technical communication work, and the process of moving from the academic world to the world of business and industry. I took a leave of absence without pay and spent an entire semester hunting up work and writing documentation for a living.
This chapter discusses the issues surrounding the decision to span boundaries to go from technical communication educator to technical communication professional from the point of view of a person considering supplementing his or her academic work with industry experience. First, I examine the reasons why a person would want to stretch a career to cover professional technical writing work, and the various kinds of jobs you can expect to do. I then examine the qualifications you will need to perform well in these kinds of jobs. I will then examine these qualifications more closely, in the context of the differences between the world of academia and the world of industy in technical writing. This analysis will show the kinds of obstacles that an academic can expect when working as an independent, and understand ways to overcome them.
