[austechwriter] Re: Another one down

Hello Melanie,
 
I truly hope you find something soon. I have been retrenched "twice" during my 
career and I know plenty of people who have had this experience. It is probably 
fair to say that in today's world most people will experience this at least one 
in their working life time especially with all the M and A (Yank term for 
"Mergers and Ascquisitions") activity going on. Luck of the draw I guess.
 
While retrenchment can be a painful experience it is also an "opportunity". Now 
is the time to think about what you really want to do. Have you done a SWOT 
analysis?
 
SWOT is where you list down your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and 
Threats. This is a useful exercise as quite often ideas come out of the 
exercise that you might not have thought of before.
 
You may find that technical writing in IT may not be the way to go. I'll 
explain some of the issues in a minute.
 
There are a number of other IT related roles that you can choose from. Have you 
considered, for example, becoming, say, a Business Analyst or Tester or 
something like that? These seem to be the few growth areas in IT at the moment. 
As a Business Analyst you learn to understand the software from a system 
implementation point of view and you learn about how a particular 
industry/customer uses a software developer's products i.e. you specialise 
(which means you are in demand!). With that knowledge you go to customers and 
discusses their needs and enhancements they want made to the system etc (you 
will be writing specifications and the like so you will still really be 
technical writing but then these days everybody is really a technical writer in 
one way or another anyway. Or how about becoming a tester? As a tester you try 
to break the software and, if you are not too fond of programmers or like 
breaking things, this can be great fun. Then again you could become a User 
Interface expert
 advising on usability deficiencies in the software etc etc. There are even 
companies that specialise in these different areas who provide consulting 
services to companies in these areas.
 
While things are slowly picking up in IT again, IT is no longer the pot of gold 
it once was, particularly for both Programmers (even Java programmers are 
feeling the pinch) and technical writers.
 
As a technical writer in the IT arena, one can sometimes be called upon to 
write truly "technical" material i.e. not just user help and the like. I have 
found that it is not ununusual to have to scan lines of code to find out how 
something works because all too often programmers are too busy to be able to 
give you meaningful answers. If you're really lucky the programmers might have 
commented their code but don't count on that. Having said that, sometimes it is 
possible to dump the techie type material on someone else i.e. one of the 
programmers but it doesn't always work out that way. With Java it is possible 
to use Javadoc to create techie doco and you can blame the programmers if the 
output is far from ideal.
 
The course you mention would help but IT is a peculiar world and so 
qualifications you obtain in the computing world have to some degree a limited 
"useful life" to you. For one thing languages and technologies used keep 
changing on you. After you've come up to speed with a new language for the 
third or fourth time you begin to get fed up with the lunacy of the IT world 
and pray that the Open source world will one day come up with a new language 
for all that has the ease (i.e. mainstream productivity) of BASIC or PASCAL, 
that has none of the proprietary rubbish put there by Companies with vested 
interests (mentioning no names but I do include the current crop of languages 
which are guilty of doing this - even if they use the open source community to 
assist their language's development - if you know what "deprecate" is then you 
know what I mean!).
 
In the old days, of course (e.g. Fortran and the like), the languages were more 
or less universal and didn't change so often i.e. not machine/company specific. 
To give you a different perspective on this; how many ways do you know of that 
car companies use to put the wheels on a car? Answer: One, they bolt they 
wheels on! Well, true car companies are guilty of built-in obsolescence i.e. 
cars are deliberately designed to fall to bits after 5 years or less, but 
still, the car industry is probably a lot more productive than the IT world.
 
Having said all of the above, if you happen to thrive in a chaotic and insane 
world, then being a technical writer in IT might be the way to go. It all 
depends...
 
Good luck.
 
Regards,
 
Tony
 
 
 


Melanie Dixon <meldixon@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi everyone,
My position at Jupiters was made redundant on June 20. 

Does anyone have any advice for the newly retrenched? The job market seems a 
bit barren. 

I do have a specific query. I want to improve my technical skills so I can work 
in a software development team and write technical documents, such as 
functional specifications etc. I thought doing the programming certificate at 
TAFE would be a good idea. Am I right or should I be concentrating on another 
technical area?

Any advice is well appreciated.

Cheers,

Melanie


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