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The Ideal Technical Communications Resume.

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.

Resumes. 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 resume is often the only chance candidates get to demonstrate their potential.

Your resume 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 by Bay Area high-tech company hiring managers. They work, and you will too once you implement them.

To see our advice in an abbreviated form, minus the explanations, see our Resume Checklist. To see our advice put into practice, review these sample resumes (in Acrobat or Word format).

The Role of a Resume

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

The purpose of a resume 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 resume convinces the hiring manager that having you aboard will improve the team's efficiency and effectiveness.

If your resume 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 well-informed, motivated, and skilled candidate.

Contact Info

Be sure to include as many as possible of the following elements:

Optional: Physical address, titles (such as Senior Technical Writer, Technical Publications Consultant, Production Specialist, etc.), middle or maiden names, suffixes (Sr, Jr, etc.), and a Fictitious Business Name (or 'DBA')

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

In days of yore — before the internet became so commercial and when job boards were comparatively secure — we used to ask candidates to include their mailing address on their resume. Alas, these days resumes are all-too-public documents, and we respect your right not to advertise where you live.

Objective statement

Include an Objective statement at the top of your resume. It orients busy, inattentive readers and makes clear that you've read the job description and understand what the hiring manager needs. Keep your statement succinct, typically no longer than 30 words.

An Objective statement won't make hiring managers hire you, but ineffective ones will make them stop reading. It should engage their curiosity, or at least reassure them that you won't waste their time by spending another minute or two exploring your candidacy.

Here are a few helpful Objective statements, to illustrate the point:

Summary statement

A Summary statement is optional. Use it in conjunction with an Objective statement when you need to give a quick overview of your professional experience. It is not the same as an Objective statement (which we consider mandatory), and is most helpful as an acknowledgement of the bredth of your background if this experience could make you qualified for roles you do not wish to pursue.

When Andrew sought a staff recruiting job during the 2001-2004 recession, he used the following Summary statement:

Resourceful, candidate-focused recruiter with 8 years' high-tech recruiting experience and 10 years as a Technical Writer and Publications Manager. Hands-on technology experience includes relational databases, data networks, programming languages, enterprise applications, operating systems, and documentation authoring/online help tools. Tenacious, tireless, and principled.

Tools

For high-tech industry positions, include your Technical Skills immediately after your Objective statement. Your goal is to convey as much relevant information as possible, as quickly as possible, to induce the hiring manager to keep reading. Tables both achieve the desired effect and prove your competence as a communicator, so we encourage you to use them to categorize the tools, technologies, and other skills you possess.

List as many tools, competencies, and skills (not interests or mere goals) as you can, and group them into discrete sections. See our Skills Inventory and Sample Resumes (Synergistech's sample resumes for your inspection) for suggestions about the kinds of categories to use.

Here is Andrew's Technical Skills section from his days as a Contract Technical Writer (c. 1994), to illustrate the point:

Tools FrameMaker 5.5.6, Word 97 (and other MS Office 97 apps), Interleaf, WebWorksPublisher, FrontPage 98, JavaDoc, JavaHelp, RoboHelp Office, ForeHelp, Doc-to-Help, Visio, CorelDRAW, Illustrator, HomeSite, Photoshop, Netscape Communicator 4, Microsoft Internet Explorer 5, RDBMS (Oracle 8i, Sybase SQL Server, Informix Dynamic Server)
Applications Oracle Commerce Server, Oracle Accounts Payable, Oracle Consumer Packaged Goods, Siebel Marketing Enterprise, Siebel Call Center, Clarify ClearAnswer, SAP Human Resources, PeopleSoft Risk Management, PeopleSoft Asset Management, BroadVision One-to-One Commerce.
Languages Read SQL, C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Visual Basic, FORTRAN, and Pascal. Read and write COBOL.
Platforms UNIX (BSD 4.3, Solaris, HP-UX, NeXTStep, AIX, A/UX, Linux), MS-DOS 6.2, Macintosh System 8, Windows 95, Windows NT, Bull GCOS, Control Data NOS/VE, Convergent CTOS/VM, DG AOS/VS, HP MPE XL, OS/2 2.0, Prime PRIMOS, Stratus VOS, ed, ex, vi, emacs UNIX editors, VAX/VMS, and Wang VS.
Networking

Protocols — AppleTalk; APPC/LU6.2; Async.; CLNS, CT/Net; DECnet, DG/PC*I (NetBIOS); Apollo Domain; LAN Manager; NetBEUI; Novell IPX; Ungermann-Bass Net/One; PC/VS; SNMP; TCP/IP; Banyan VINES; WSN; XNS; XODIAC.
Carriers — Ethernet, Frame Relay, ISDN, and Token Ring.

Hardware Apple iMac and PowerBook G3, Control Data Cyber, Convergent NGEN, Data General MV 20000, DEC VAX 6000, Fortune, Hewlett-Packard 3000/900, IBM RS/6000 POWERserver, NeXT, Pentium III PC, PS/2, Prime 50, Sequent Symmetry, Silicon Graphics IRIS, Sun SPARCstation, Stratus XA2000, and Wang VS 5000.

Professional Experience

Your resume's Professional Experience section provides the bulk of the evidence for your claim that you are qualified for a given position. We recommend that you list, in reverse-chronological order, the positions you've held for at least the past ten years (if they're in the same or a similar profession), and detail your relevant accomplishments for each. For each position, cite your title, the name of the company, the company's or site's location, and your beginning and ending dates (in mm/yyyy format). If your title was inconsistent with your main duties, you can supply a different one and then include your formal title following it in parentheses.

It is crucial that you not catalog your responsibilities in each of your former positions. Instead, cite your accomplishments. More specifically, cite those accomplishments you believe will be relevant in the role you seek, and omit the rest. Lead each bullet item with energized, engaging verbs to draw attention to specific details of your role and the impact you generated; your resume is not the place for subtlety or nuance.

Synergistech recommends that you cite your experience with key technologies in the context of entries in your Professional Experience section, rather than just cataloging them under Technical Skills. For example, "...saved company $250K in translation costs within first six months by leading migration to DITA using FrameMaker 7.2, finetuning the XML, and directing the development of XSLT scripts" or "Researched content-management systems (CMS) and helped customize Drupal, our chosen Linux-based solution, to work with multiple departments' MySQL databases, saving over $50K in consulting fees."

For past positions that aren't obviously relevant to your current goal, cite only those accomplishments that are germaine. For example, if you worked in QA before becoming a technical communicator, you might write "...flagged and fixed documentation bugs, reviewed several 200+ page developer-oriented manuals for technical accuracy" and omit any mention of the rest of your role.

Education

The Education section of your resume 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 relevant professional conferences you attended or classes you have taken (or are taking) that you believe will improve your effectiveness in the workplace.

Technology industry companies are wary of technical communicators who either don't make the effort, or will take too long, to understand their products. They look to your resume 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, Linux, SQL and relational databases (RDBMSs), networking, FrameMaker, online help authoring tools (HATs), structured authoring, and writing for translation, will make you a much stronger candidate in the eyes of hiring managers and developers alike.

Most 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 communications departments, 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 just an ego boost 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 resume?

If you're straight out of school or a 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 resume, between (for example) your Objective and Work Experience sections.

But if you have professional technical communications experience, your accomplishments in such positions and the skills you acquired 'in the real world' are of infinitely greater interest 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 resume. Courses in computer programming, systems administration, Information Mapping, tools (such as RoboHELP, DITA, FrameMaker, or Illustrator), and so on are definitely worth noting on your resume.

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 resume, after Education, 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). For more suggestions about related groups, see our listing of Communications-related Professional Organizations.

Change the name of this section to "Affiliations and Awards" if you have won any relevant awards for your professional contributions. Many Technical Writers, for example, opt to include in this section details of their successful entries in local or international technical communications competitions or their recognition by an STC chapter or committe for outstanding service.

References

Do not include the names and contact information of your references in the same file as your resume. Your resume will not be kept confidential — indeed the job boards do their best to make sure everyone everywhere sees it — so don't compromise the individuals whose trust you've worked so hard to cultivate by sharing their names and contact information with the world.

Also, don't write "References and writing samples available upon request." It's understood. If you do not have professional references or writing samples to share, and your resume doesn't make that clear (eg, this is your first job out of school, or you've only ever worked in places where no one speaks English), you should certainly state in your cover letter that you are unable to supply such basic supporting evidence.

This is not to suggest that references aren't important. They are crucial.

No one gets hired without a reference check any more. And even as some companies, fearful of lawsuits, 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 is not to 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 unless you're confident they understand what goes in to creating your deliverable. References who don't understand what it takes to do what you did can damage your candidacy with their ignorance. Comments such as "She met her deadlines" or "He showed up" leave prospective managers underwhelmed.

To help us help you find work, it helps greatly if you include (in a separate note) along with your resume 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. As we indicate on our Candidate Registration page, we respect your right to keep this information private until the time comes to forward your resume to one of our clients.

Focus

You may be on your fourth career and have more work experience than the hiring manager's boss, but your resume 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 resume 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. The less-focused the contents of your resume, 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?

Put bluntly, when you apply to a job, you are implicitly asking to be compensated for all the experience you list in your resume. If a hiring manager considers that experience insufficiently relevant, you won't get an interview.

Chronological or Functional?

The hiring managers we work with strongly prefer chronological resumes that show what you did in each job and which tools you used to accomplish what. Our clients tend not to respond well to functional resumes, where your experience is categorized by function (eg, Writing, Editing, Managing) unless they're hiring you as a contractor or consultant to provide a specific and relatively esoteric service. Even then, our clients trust chronological resumes more because they show how long you held a given position, whether you were called back (repeat engagements are a strong indicator of customer satisfaction), and whether you were inexplicably out of work for more than a few months.

You may have been advised to write a functional resume 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:

See our sample resumes (Synergistech's sample resumes for your inspection) for more details.

Organization & Design

As a technical communicator, your resume 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 (eg, vapid objective or summary statements, or long bulleted lists that are all but content-free), 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 resume 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.

Just as all ingredients are not equal, however, 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 $85/hr contract publications manager?

In terms of design, unless you're a graphic artist or illustrator, a resume is not the right medium in which to demonstrate your artistic prowess. It is important, however, that it be tidy and inviting to the eye. If you don't understand the principles of effective visual communication, your resume 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.

One more word to the wise: Synergistech can tell a lot about whether candidates know their tools by turning on MS Word's "Formatting Marks" (under Tools, then Options, then View) and glancing at their resume. If you've including two tab stops or return symbols where one would do, or have kludged together a hanging indent or bulleted list, we know you either don't know how to take advantage of the program's power or that you're lazy. If we can do this, the hiring manager can too. Is this the signal you would prefer to send?

Length

It is fine to write a three- or even four-page resume if the content is focused on your accomplishments (rather than merely your responsibilities) and is relevant to the role you seek. To grab hiring managers' attention, present the information they seek boldly and unambiguously. Don't make them use their imaginations. When writing about your experience, don't assume anyone else knows what you created, which tools you used, who your audience was, or what hurdles you had to clear to develop and 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 resume 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 six-, seven-, and even thirteen-pagers, and they tend to get noticed for all the wrong reasons.

Cover Letter

In general, a good cover letter is addressed to a specific person with the content relating to a specific job description. Instead of saying more, here's a template (Synergistech's sample resumes for your inspection) for what we consider an ideal cover letter. When sending us your resume without reference to a specific job or contract, it isn't necessary to include a cover letter — but anything you do include helps us get to know you better.

When you respond to a specific job listing (including listings you see on our site), it's very helpful in include a cover note citing specific skills, interests, and background that relate to the job description. The content of these notes is frequently invaluable in making a case to a busy hiring manager to interview and ultimately hire 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 resume, one option that helps clarify matters for clients is to state explicitly that you either do or do not require relocation ("relo") assistance. In the latter case, consider asking a local friend or relative whether you can list their address and phone number on your resume, either in addition to or instead of your own. The goal is to send hiring managers the message that you have local accommodation and that hiring you will not cost them any more than a local candidate. Getting a virtual (local) phone number through a service such as Vonage is also a wise decision.

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 resumes are in the capitalization of FrameMaker, RoboHelp, and UNIX. Please check the spelling of keywords against our list of frequently misspelled words, and have a fellow technical communicator look over your resume before you send it, if at all possible.
  2. Cull double spaces/tabs/periods/commas/parentheses/return symbols.
  3. Remove left-and-right justification (left justification is infinitely easier to read) and underlining (bold, small caps, and italics are much more contemporary, not to mention attractive). Turn all-cap'd text into its mixed-case equivalent.
  4. Ensure consistent spacing between paragraphs, indentation, column widths, line lengths, bullet shapes, use of bold/italics/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 needs to receive your resume as a formatted Word file (any platform or version). Please don't send us an Acrobat, FrameMaker, HTML, or XML file, and definitely don't send us an ASCII (text-only) one. Our reasoning: We want to send the hiring manager the same resume that you'd hand them in person, and having formatted softcopy not only allows us to search its contents but to replace your contact information with ours and then email it on to them (after you've given your informed consent, of course).

Refrain from putting your resume in online help format — such resumes usually lack visual elegance, and there's no guarantee the reader will see the whole thing. Help files 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, standard-format resume.

Send us your Resume

As you prepare your resume, please read more about how we work and send us what you've created along with the rest of the information we request.

 

Thanks for reading this far. We hope you found 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 please send us your resume!

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