Red-Hot Demand for Technical Writers

After a slowdown in high tech (some called it a ‘deep freeze’), chip, router, switch, and software companies have started hiring again—aggressively. In their April 19th Business Section, the San Francisco Chronicle put the number of California high-tech companies at 49,100. They export $47.8 billion worth of high-tech software and hardware. And they all need technical writers, sometimes as many as 30 of them.

The May, 2006 issue of Money magazine lists Technical Writer as number 13 in its list of the most in-demand, desirable, high-paying jobs for the coming decades.

As the world buys more and more semiconductors for computers, iPod’s, cell phones, and Blackberrys, chip manufacturers hire technical writers. When businesses upgrade their software to get new features that make them more competitive, software makers hire technical writers. When businesses buy more or bigger routers for their employees, or telephone companies need more powerful switches to handle cell-phone traffic, the makers of these products hire tech writers to produce install, configuration, and operation guides to administrators.

While a microwave company only needs one or two pages of customer instructions, Cisco and Oracle need hundreds of thousands of pages of instructions for system and network administrators. Software makers must update the equivalent of five or seven manuals for each product for each new version.

The typical chip, software, router, or switch manufacturer has a staff of from four to 12 tech writers. Larger software makers like Oracle have thirty different technical publications departments, with up to 12 tech writers working in each department.

When business heats up, like it has again, brand new companies who have received millions in venture capital need technical writers to explain their hot new technology in white papers and Web site content.

Later in the lifecycle of a new high-tech company, a Technical Writer must set up a system for both writing and then distributing customer instructions (documentation). This involves creating a template in FrameMaker, or using new XML technology to put instructions on a Web site.

You can try your hand at writing manuals right on this Web site. In our online course, How to Do Tech Writing, you write two real manuals. Our editors tell you how to improve them, so that you can show them to a prospective employer. That’s how you get a job in this field: by showing your manuals you wrote.