Aaron K. Redshaw

Start with a good resume

This post will not go into resume writing basics. There are some great guides out there for free already on that topic. Here I will just cover what is specific to technical writing.

Keywords are key

According to Josh Hrala at careerminds.com, 17% of all resumes submitted are never read by a human being. Instead, they are processed by an ATS (applicant tracking system), which searches for certain keywords that match the job description. If these words are not in the resume, they will never be forwarded to the hiring manager.

So here is what you can do:

Look at job descriptions for positions you might like. Find the most common keywords and write them down. Compile a list over a number of jobs you find. Likely a lot of these words are regarding certain technologies. Now try to use as many of these words in your resume as possible. But don’t do this dishonestly. That will likely backfire, preventing a company from even considering you for future positions.

For example, let’s say you are looking for a tech writing job on LinkedIn and you keep finding that most of them require some knowledge of HTML. If you do not know HTML, then write that down on a list as something to learn. There are a great many HTML tutorials online for free, such as sololearn.com or w3schools.com. HTML can be learned in a couple of weeks. Once you get the hang of it, including some real-life practice, put it on your resume under “Skills.” If you use it somewhere you volunteer, or for your own website, that’s even better.

Sections to include:

A resume for technical writing should include any experience related to the job. Since I used to do technical support, I made sure to include that. I also volunteered for a startup and wrote a white paper for them. I put that on my resume as well.

Here’s what you can include in your resume:

• Objective
• Skills
• Work Experience
• Education

If your work experience is unrelated to technical writing, include any parts of it that might have some relation if you can. Perhaps at your last job you did a fair amount of writing, or you used Photoshop or InDesign, or helped update the website. Put these in a Skills section above your Work Experience if you have lots of skills related to tech writing, but little experience.

Keep building over time

This is a process. A journey. Each time you learn a new technology, put it under Skills on your resume. If you gain some experience, volunteering somewhere, or writing something in your current job, put it in the Experience section of your resume. Keep learning and developing. As you build your resume, you will also want to build your LinkedIn profile, but I’ll talk about that another time. You will also need to write some good customized cover letters, which will be the topic of my next blog post. Feel free to leave comments below.