Reasons for Wanting to Work in Industry
As with any important career move, you want to approach it with a clear idea of your reasons. If you’re currently teaching technical writing and want to gain workplace experience, you will do it for a number of reasons. I discuss some of the more usual ones below. Those reasons fall into two categories: those that allow for a partial involvement, doing occasional work or smaller projects while still teaching — moonlighting, in other words; and those that require a total immersion in the workplace — a new career.
Moonlighting
You Want to Supplement Your Income
According to various STC Salary Surveys, the mean salary for technical communication professionals is somewhere around $61K per year (2003 STC Technical Communicator Salary Survey). The average salary of a technical communication educator is about $55K (2003 STC Academic Salary Survey). No, the incentive to do the occasional technical writing project to increase your monthly take-home pay really comes from the myth, or misconception, that technical writers make more per year than their university or college counterparts. We hear of writing for $65 per hour, or getting a thousand dollars a day as a consultant. These figures can entice a person to try this kind of work irregardless of the reality of the situation: that this money goes to well established companies or individuals with a vast skill set and strong reputation. The average technical writing instructor has little chance stepping into this kind of work like you would step out of a cab and into the lobby of a plush hotel. It’s more like stepping off the sidewalk into the street … a busy street.
You Want to Enhance Your Teaching
In a survey I conducted in 2005, 90% (out of 108 respondents) agreed with the following statement: “I am a better teacher if I have industry experience in addition to academic experience.” (A Survey of Attitudes Towards STC Among Academics—A Report)
It makes sense that a technical communication educator would want to gain workplace experience to enhance teaching. How can you teach design principles, document formats, management practices, estimating techniques, review strategies and other such elements with just the benefit of a textbook. Technical communication educators need not only workplace experience, but they need a steady dose of it. This rationale, for example, underlies the idea of faculty internships, where academics can spend time doing industry work. The designers of such programs reason that partnerships between workplace professionals and academic professionals can strengthen technical communication education. Workplace projects can give the teacher a ready supply of "real" examples, and the discussion of them increases the students’ respect for the teacher.
You Want to do Research
Technical communication professionals in education need, often, to fulfill a research obligation to their institution. This research obligation usually requires funded research into workplace practices, design theory, or work in the many feeder disciplines to technical communication: end-user computing, cognitive psychology, human factors, linguistics, management, and the like. It takes the form of articles, books, chapters of books, conference presentations, and textbooks, all bearing the person’s university or college affiliation.
The workplace offers many chances for productive research. I have done some such work among computer users at a national scientific lab, and I have surveyed (while I served on what was then called the Academe/Industry Committee of the STC) our TTU alumni for information about tools and kinds of work. Like any knowledge building activity, this kind of research helps define the profession of technical communication educator, and provides ample stimulus for taking on a project, surveying users, designing usability studies, and other research-related workplace activities.
The kinds of motivations I’ve discussed above allow you to work part–time as a technical communicator and retain your position at a university or college. You retain your health, retirement, and other insurance, and so does your family in most cases. You can add the work to your resume as consultant work, and list the company as one of your clients. However, you can not use the writing you do for a company as a substitute for writing you do to fulfill your obligation to research. That is to say, writing manuals will not get you tenure. On the other hand, it can get your research agenda moving and help you identify research questions.
Opportunities to do consulting work appear regularly to the academic. Potential clients will show up in your office. Once I had a visit from a baffled pair of administrators from the local municipal court needing to make sense out of their ticket processing system. Another time I discussed work with a colorful, mustachioed cowboy named Steve who pulled a laptop out of a saddlebag, plugged in a stick drive, and demonstrated his rodeo management software to me in my office. “Works for any timed, competitive event!” Steve was looking for someone to write “the handbook.”
For much of the kind of work I did that came to me, I created a one–page “consultant’s resume,” containing a list of skills, previous clients, interests and other information that I could use to introduce myself to a potential client. For the kind of work in will discuss next, you will have to change your entire career, leave academia behind and completely immerse yourself into workplace activities for an extended period.
New Career
You Want a Career Change
For some technical communication educators, the business world looks fast–paced and romantic. It’s players come and go, make big bucks, buy fishing boats, and always stay in nicer hotels at the conferences. Companies pay to put you, one of their employees, through expensive training seminars costing a thousand dollars a day. They fly you in helicopters and cater your lunch. (This actually happened to me once, while I served on a university committee for Digital Equipment Corporation.) This conception of workplace pizzazz lures graduate students into leaving their comfy academic classrooms and cubicles for industrial cubicles and work groups. Or they leave, thinking you can sit back in your remote office with the rocky mountains outside your picture window and your satellite dish connecting you to high–paying remote clients. You get a greater reward perhaps, because of the concreteness of the challenges, the late–night, coffee–fueled deadlines, the triumphant product roll out. You have a proximity to much better technology, and if you really enjoy technology, you have much better toys to play with at IBM than you do at a local community college.
The reality of working for a company may turn out to be much different. Working on project teams, meeting deadlines, and working toward corporate goals is a serious and exhilarating endeavor, but it is rarely romantic. Like any kind of career, it requires commitment and a close fit between your personal goals and lifestyle and that of a company.
You Want to Accompany a Family Member to Another Location
More often than not your motivation to simply pull up roots and dive into a new career comes as a package, along with the motivation to follow a spouse or family member to a new city or state. In this case you have major changes ahead of you, because you have to relinquish your ties to your existing job and deal with the uncertainties and newness of a new location and a new career at the same time.
This kind of uprooting represents the most drastic change you can make in your career, and requires a good deal of thought, planning, and care. They say if you’re starting out as a technical communication independent that you need at least 6–months’ salary squirreled away to get you started. A woman I corresponded with told me her salary dropped 20% the first year. Depending on your market, your skills, and your ambition, it can take up to a year or more after you actually start before you see a profit.
In my excursion into the workplace, I took the kind of drastic move I’m describing above, because I had good reasons. My two young children had moved to Long Island and I wanted to spend time near them. I had taken a paid leave of absence in New York the year before to finish a textbook, and so I knew something of the market and the culture there. I’ll tell you a couple of things that convinced me I could do it: my past experience (I’d worked individual projects in the past and knew how to write manuals) and the February 1995 issue of Technical Communication, including the Special Section: Measuring the Value Added by Professional Technical Communicators, which gave me a justification for my services and led me to believe I could convince software developers of the value of a technical writer. I thought I could get work.
But as I prepared to launch my mini–career in the Spring of 1995, I did something that proved very useful to me later: I inventoried my skills as a technical communication professional — not as an educator — and used that inventory as a base for my planning decisions. If you’re thinking of making a similar move, the inventory of writing skills below can help you feel out your areas of strengths, because you’ll need them.
March 6, 1995 APPLICATION FOR OFFICIAL LEAVE OF ABSENCE Under the section “Purpose of Leave:” To gain experience as a freelance consultant writing manuals andonline help for software products. Benefits to the individual and the institution: Gain field experience applying theories to print and online documents Increase knowledge of tools and technical communication Learn documentation procedures in the workplace Improve course content Improve teaching methods The form also contains a section called “Salary arrangement” where I typed “Contracting fees paid by clients.” |