Not everyone comes into this profession with the intention of being a technical communicator. And from what I have observed over the years, those that studied to become technical communicators in college end up using their education as a launching point for a different kind of career. It all seems very ironic.
When I was 9 years old, I was pretty sure I wanted to be a writer. I was an avid reader – mostly Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames books. I thought I could easily write novels like those using my neighborhood friends as characters. I thought it would be so much fun to see how those friends would solve situations that might happen right in our neighborhood.
As I got older, I found that I was really good at diagramming sentences and other English studies. That reinforced my younger desire to become a writer. Then in 9th grade, I was exposed to some very complicated books and novels that intimidated me and made me feel like I could never really become a writer after all. I could never come up with all that sort of complicated plotting. Even so, the desire to write did not leave.
As an adult, I tried my hand at all sorts of writing. I added reading self-help and non-fiction books to my novel reading. Switching back and forth. And I had some life experiences that I thought might be useful to others if I wrote them down and shared them. I was in my twenties when I wrote my first book (it was never published so don’t look for it). It was called, No Thanks, I Don’t Do That Dance Anymore. It was all about surviving an appallingly abusive relationship – from getting out, working through the healing process and then developing myself to the point where I would no longer attract abuse or abusive men into my life.
I learned from the experience of writing that book, what it took to write and publish a book – a very long and arduous process. I even gave it to a man at work for whom I had a great deal of respect and asked for his opinion of it. He was the manager of a software development team and at the time I was an administrative assistant for a Quality Assurance group. I wrote and edited Material Safety Data Sheets and technical specifications for the chemicals we developed and used in our oilfield services (don’t hate me for that).
In a few years, our company was acquired and they moved the headquarters to Houston. I didn’t have an appetite to move to Houston so I turned down the move offer and found myself looking for work. During that time as an administrative assistant, I found I had a knack for turning highly technical information spit out by engineers into concise English understandable by non-technical people.
So when my software development manager friend was managing a project to migrate a highly technical software application to a new platform, he hired me to write the online help system for him. When he asked me if I thought I could do that, I said, “Of course, I can do that.” And that’s how my real career in technical communications started. And guess what? I had no idea how to do that, but I did know three things. The first was that I wanted to earn a living writing, the second was I could learn to do anything. The third and most important was, this was my opportunity to do both. So I jumped in with both feet and have never looked back.
Why do I tell that story? Because for those of you who are on this path suffering from the dreaded “impostor syndrome” because you have no formal education in Technical Communications but are working in the field in some manner, or you would just like to try your hand at it, you are not alone. And for those of you who might have studied Technical Communications in college and planned a career in it, you might find yourself in the workforce yearning for something else. And in that, you are not alone either.
Remember there are many paths that can be taken to become almost anything.
Well done!