The Ideal Technical Publications Résumé

Wondering how to improve your chances of getting that ideal next (or first) job as a Technical Communicator? This article explains some of our views on one of the most important elements of your job search.

Résumés. Few enjoy writing them, and fewer like being quizzed about their contents. But with busy hiring managers making quick decisions with very few facts and little room for error, a résumé is sometimes the only chance candidates get to demonstrate their potential.

Your résumé is your most important portfolio piece because it's the first writing sample any hiring manager will see. We've compiled the following suggestions to help you get noticed in the Bay Area's software development industry. They work, and you will too once you implement them.
To see our advice in an abbreviated form minus the explanations, please go to our
Résumés Checklist article. To see our advice put into practice in our sample résumés (in Acrobat or Word 6 format).

 

The Role of a Résumé

In your technical communications job search, a good résumé opens doors. The other kind just raises your hopes and wastes your time.

The purpose of a résumé is to get you an interview. It does this by demonstrating your understanding of —  and proven ability to meet —  the hiring manager's requirements. Specifically, a successful résumé convinces the hiring manager that having you aboard will improve the team's efficiency and ability to meet its goals.

If your résumé persuades the hiring manager that you have succeeded in a similar environment producing similar deliverables for a similar audience, and that you won't take too great a toll on his or her resources (budget, time, subject-matter-expert support, and so on), it has done its job and you'll be invited to interview.

Note that it is seldom sufficient simply to express an interest in, and aptitude for doing what the hiring manager needs. As we discuss in Escaping the Catch-22  most hiring managers can't afford to take a chance hiring a candidate who hasn't proven his or her effectiveness in that company's market, using its tools, and addressing the needs of its audience — and they're unlikely to use their imagination. It's unfortunate, but hiring managers with the time and patience to mentor an entry-level worker are a vanishing breed, so if you're serious about breaking into technical communications, you'll need to present yourself as a solid, well-informed, and motivated candidate.

Contact Info

Be sure to include as many as possible of the following elements: Optional: Titles (such as Senior Technical Writer, Technical Publications Consultant, Production Specialist, etc.), middle or maiden names, suffixes (Sr, Jr, III), a Fictitious Business Name (or 'DBA'), and pager, cellular, or car phone numbers.

Unadvisable: Appelations (such as Mr., Mrs., Ms, or Dr.), designations of advanced degrees after your surname at the top of your résumé (M.A., J.D., Ph.D., etc.), and other status symbols (especially 'Esq').

Length

It is fine to write a two- or even three-page resume if the details of each job are very specific and relevant. To grab hiring managers' attention, present the information they seek boldly and unambiguously. When writing about your experience, don't assume anyone else knows what you created, which tools you used, who your audience was, or what you had to go through to develop or deliver your product.

In other words, be specific about:

 Be careful to not merely inventory your responsibilities. That's a great way to cure the hiring manager's insomnia.

All this said, try not to let your résumé get much over two or three pages unless all of the experience you list is directly pertinent to the jobs you plan to apply for. We've seen five- and even thirteen-pagers, and they tend to get noticed for all the wrong reasons.

Focus

You may be on your fourth career and have more work experience than the hiring manager's boss, but your résumé won't get you the interview unless it focuses ruthlessly on the skills and achievements that qualify you for the current position. Unless every item in your résumé responds directly to the question, "Which aspects of my experience are most likely to make me an effective candidate for this position?," it is almost certainly going to get mediocre-to-negative results.

Take the hiring manager's viewpoint for a moment. The less focused the contents of your résumé, the more concerned they are likely to be that you either don't really understand their needs, or that you'll lose interest and be a "flight risk" once they've brought you up to speed and you're finally "repaying" their investment in you. Is this the signal you wanted to send when you included that line about your world travels or your plans to go to film school?

Organization & Design

As a Technical Communicator, your résumé is the first and most important element of your portfolio. It is a document over which you have total control, and it must prove that you can organize and present information to achieve a desired effect. If it's poorly organized (e.g., long bulleted lists that don't say much), unfocused, ugly, or contains typos, you may walk on water at room temperature —  but your phone still won't ring.

The most common cause of disorganization is strict adherence to the Stew Philosophy of Résumé Writing - namely, "As long as it's in there, who cares where or why?" Devotees of this practice typically list everything they've done for their past employers and clients, add a few prepositions and modifiers, and call it stew - reasoning that any one of those skills might come in handy on the next job, so they all deserve the same visibility.

But just as all ingredients are not equal, some skills are predictably more valuable to the kinds of companies you plan to approach, and it pays to give those skills top billing. To use an extreme, but real, example, would you want someone thinking — even for a minute — that you'd accept administrative work because you listed 'made travel arrangements for clients' in the course of your duties as a $75/hr contract publications manager?

In terms of design, a résumé is not the right medium in which to demonstrate your artistic prowess, but it is important that it be tidy and inviting to the eye. If you don't understand the principles of effective visual communication, your résumé will say so, loudly. So pay close attention to your use of white space, type, indentation and alignment, rules, and other visual elements, because you can't afford to make a bad impression before the hiring manager has read a word of your writing. And if you know someone with a background in document layout or design, ask them for feedback. Their comments will give you insights into which design elements to include, and which to exclude, on revisions in the future.

Chronological or Functional?

The hiring managers we work with strongly prefer chronological résumés that show what you did in each job and which tools you used to accomplish what. They do not respond well to functional résumés (in which work is categorized by function e.g. Writing, Editing, Managing.)

You may have been advised to write a functional résumé if your relevant work experience is light or repetitive (that is, you've done the same kinds of work over and over again for more than a couple years). Our advice is to avoid hiding the fact that you've only had brief exposure to the kinds of work you want to do; it'll only get you in trouble on the job. We much prefer to see a chronological resume that describes:

 Refer to our sample résumés for more details.

Tools

List as many as you can, and categorize them. See our web-based Skills Inventory for suggestions about the kinds of categories to use.

Education

The Education section of your résumé is your chance to show off your degree (or, if you did not graduate, at least to name the post-secondary school or schools you attended), cite your major, and note any related conferences you attended or classes you have taken (or are taking) that can be expected to improve your effectiveness in the workplace.

Technology industry companies are ever-wary of Technical Writers who either don't want, or will take too long, to understand their products. They look to your résumé for evidence that you keep your skills current. They favor candidates who demonstrate the initiative to take — and the perseverance to complete — classes in the subject areas in which they intend to work. A track record of taking classes on such topics as C, C++, Java, UNIX, SQL and relational databases (RDBMSs), networking, FrameMaker, Windows and HTML-based online help, HTML authoring, webs ite development, and multimedia authoring, etc, will make you a much stronger candidate in the eyes of hiring managers and developers alike.

Many Bay Area companies require their employees to have at least a Bachelor's degree (that is, a BA or BS). In software development

(as opposed to end user-) oriented technical publications, most of the same companies look more favorably on candidates with computer technology-related majors (especially Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering) from 'name' technology schools (MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, and RPI are their favorites, but they don't seem to mind degrees from Berkeley or Stanford either...). Maybe it's an ego thing for them, but it doesn't hurt for you to push these buttons if you can.

Regardless of where you went to school or even whether you graduated, where should you put the Education section in your résumé?

If you're straight out of school or a Technical Writing Certificate Program, and have never worked as a Technical Communicator before, your education is probably your most marketable asset. It should therefore be positioned near the top of your résumé, between (for example) your Objective and Work Experience sections.

But if you've ever worked as a Technical Communicator before, your accomplishments in such positions and the skills you acquired 'in the real world' are of infinitely greater interest (and import) to a hiring manager than your Education. Unless you were a Computer Science major or graduated Phi Beta Kappa, your best bet is probably to 'bury' details of your academic background beneath those sections that prove that you've done this kind of work before and can do it better the next time.

Don't forget to include applicable coursework or continuing education after your formal degree in the Education section of your résumé. Courses in computer programming, systems administration, Information Mapping, tools (such as RoboHELP, FrameMaker, or Illustrator), and so on are definitely worth noting on your résumé.

One last point about your formal education - omit graduation dates. They can be used to guess your age, and that's none of the company's business. Besides, it's more fun to keep them guessing about this until (and perhaps after) they meet you.

Affiliations

Include an Affiliations section at the end of your résumé if you're a member (and especially if you're an officer or board member) of a relevant professional organization, such as the Society for Technical Communication (STC), Bay Area Publications Managers Forum (BAPMF), Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), Bay Area Editors Forum (BAEF), or American Medical Writers Association (AMWA).

Cover Letter

In general, a good cover letter is addressed to a specific person with the content relating to a specific job description. Cover letters you may send us with your electronic résumé serve mainly to let us get to know you better, but they certainly aren't necessary.

Much more necessary is the brief cover note we ask that you include with the email you send us in response to a job listing (including listings you see on our web site). This cover note should describe specific skills, interests, and background that correspond to each specific job description. The content of these notes helps us make a case to the hiring manager to interview and perhaps ultimately hire you.

References

No one gets hired without a reference check any more. And even as some companies, fearful of law suits, gag their employees who would ordinarily volunteer references for former colleagues and subordinates, it becomes more important for candidates to furnish potential employers and clients with detailed, accurate information about their past professional performance. One simple resolution: don't use existing employees of your former company; use the ones who've moved on. If that's not an option for you, some employees can be persuaded to speak off the record when they're not at work. If that still doesn't work, ask for a letter of reference on company letterhead - it's generic, but it's better than nothing.

Your references should be people who know your work well and have the qualifications and maturity to evaluate its effectiveness. For example, giving a developer or marketing person as a reference for your documentation efforts is risky because they seldom understand what goes in to creating your deliverable, and will usually just offer your prospective hiring manager such insightful comments as "She met her deadlines" or "He showed up."

In terms of our helping you find work, it helps us greatly if you include with your résumé at least two (2) professional - that is, work-related - references' names and recently verified phone numbers and email addresses. Include a brief description of where you worked with each of your references, and indicate the nature of your working relationship (former manager, peer, etc.) At least one of these references should be a former or current manager; our clients want to be sure such people have had positive experiences working with you.

If You're Not Local

Hunting for a San Francisco Bay Area job or contract when you don't live in the area poses additional challenges. All but the largest companies for which we recruit have no budget for interview-related travel costs, let alone for relocating workers.

In terms of your résumé, one option that helps clarify matters for clients is to state explicitly that you either do or do not require relocation assistance. In the latter case, consider asking a local friend or relative whether you can list their address and phone number on your résumé, either in addition to or instead of your own, to give hiring managers the message that you have local accommodation and that hiring you will not cost them any more than a local candidate.

Proofing & Formatting Errors

  1. Check carefully for misspellings (especially of keywords), grammatical errors, and lack of parallelism (especially in bulleted lists). The three most frequent mistakes we see on résumés are in the capitalization of FrameMaker, RoboHELP, and UNIX. Please check the spelling of keywords against our web-based list of frequently misspelled words, and have a fellow writer look over your résumé before you send it, if at all possible.
  2. Cull double spaces/tabs/periods/commas/parentheses.
  3. Remove justification and right justification (left justification is infinitely easier to read), underlining (bold, small caps, and italics are much more contemporary, not to mention attractive), and unnecessary hard returns (they interfere with text searches).
  4. Ensure consistent spacing between paragraphs, indentation, column widths, line lengths, bullet shapes, use of bold/italics/all caps/etc., and alignment (especially of right tabs).
  5. Check pagination by setting your computer's printer driver to a PostScript or PCL device and verifying that page breaks are both logical and attractive.

File Format

Synergistech prefers to receive your résumé as a formatted Word or FrameMaker file (any platform or version) rather than as an ASCII (text-only) dump. Our reasoning: We want to send the hiring manager the same résumé that you'd hand them in person, and having formatted softcopy not only allows us to search its contents but to email it to them (after you've given your informed consent, of course).

Web-based and Windows online help résumés are seldom as impressive as word-processed files because they usually lack visual elegance. They make great 'show and tell' and 'proof of concept' pieces during interviews (as do CD-ROMs, color artwork, brochures, newsletters, and long printed documents), but hiring managers are reluctant to browse your web site, load a help file, or view your portfolio if they have not first seen your linear, hardcopy, standard-format résumé.

Finally, please don't ask us to format your HTML or ASCII résumé for you.

Sending us your Résumé

As you're preparing to send your résumé, please read more about how we work and send along all the information requested.

To send us your resume, either:

 Thanks for reading this far. We hope you find our suggestions helpful, and that this medium proves more efficient than speaking with us over the phone, after an STC meeting, or even during a career-coaching session. We'd appreciate your feedback, and of course we'd love to see the results of our synergy. So attach your résumé!