Transitioning to Technical Writing

My transition from Systems Software Development to Technical Writing has been a very interesting and revealing journey. I have over 20 years also as a programmer, programmer analyst, and systems analyst. Covering differing platforms from mainframe to client-server to the web; I eventually ended up in the Framemaker, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and online help arena.

I'm surprised to find that many clients/managers are not very knowledgeable about the tech writing process and at many times have to be educated as to what and how the process should be done. This happened a lot during some Sarbanes-Oxley assignments. There are a lot of valuable methodologies I've found, like InfoMapping for training and user guides, Single-Sourcing for simultaneous print-bound and online help using RoboHelp and Quadralay's WebWorks.

The fascinating aspect of this field for me is how it seems to be morphing: from MS Word to Framemaker, then to Adobe InDesign. There seems to be a growing call for Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator to add/enhance graphics, with MS Visio and XML... the list goes on. Online authoring tools are often requested in the Technical Writer's resume - I'm starting to see more and more 'Technical Writers with Dreamweaver, HTML, Java, and C++" requirements.

Just my experience -