Advice for How to Approach
Becoming a Professional Communicator

Most careers in professional communication are entry level, which is to say you can qualify for them with little or no professional experience. But you have to be able to demonstrate appropriate talents and skills before applying for any of them. Since most of these job ads will ask of 3 or more years of professional experience (which you probably won’t have), plus a degree in technical communication, journalism, English, or comparable, you need to find ways to meet those “asks.” I have already pointed out that the “comparable” becomes your ticket past that hurdle. Most college degrees have a communication component, and many have huge communication components. Getting past the three year hurdle is tougher, but there are ways around that, as well.

The portfolio

What professional communication ads typically do not say is most potential employers will expect to see examples of your work (a portfolio), and there is often a test of your skills. There is no way around that portfolio. You have to have one of those before virtually any job interview. The portfolio gets you past the 3 year rule. It needs to be excellent, and it needs to have a variety of examples, but they do not need to have been done while working as a professional communicator. The work must be professional, but it need not have been done professionally. You can do projects for friends, charities, relatives, and even for yourself.

The best way to do this is to establish yourself as a freelance or contract worker. By working part time, you can continue your current job while preparing the portfolio for your next job. I will reiterate this idea many times through the rest of this book.

Fake it till ya’ Make it

If you keep your day job and freelance or contract on the side while you look for the career you really want, you can be putting that portfolio together. During that time in Purgatory, you do professional writing projects, even if you have to do them for free. The key is to build up that portfolio so you can demonstrate that you can do the job. You need to be able to show that you have done professional quality work (note that I am not saying you have to have done work professionally). So if you have a friend who you think needs a new brochure or website, help her with it and put the ultimate artifact into your portfolio. The things in your portfolio need to be the very best you can produce. You should never have to explain why something is crooked or smeared because if you do, you are showing the interviewer the piece is not professional. If you have something with a glaring flaw, redo it or remove it.

Look for local, professional organizations. The Society for Technical Communication (STC) has local chapters in many cities that meet monthly. There may be one in your city. If there is, and they have meetings, you can get a lot of support there. Most of the people who regularly attend meetings are among those who recommend or even hire new people. It is good to know them. LinkedIn has professional discussion forums, including forums on professional writing and freelance writing and looking for writing jobs. People beginning in the field, ask questions about getting started all the time. Longtime professionals will usually answer their questions. You will need connections.

Many of you will be afraid of cheating by claiming you can do more than you can really do. That is unethical, but there is a rule that many professionals take very seriously. In terms of thinking about that rule, consider the figure skater who performs at the Olympics. He was once the goofy looking kid who couldn’t keep his feet under him on the ice. Or consider the pianist at Carnage Hall. She began by playing chopsticks – badly—somewhere. Everybody who is good at something difficult was once bad at it. Every good writer was once a bad writer. Nobody ever begins any demanding area by being good at it. We all have to go through that rough and clumsy part of learning, but the successful ones keep trying until one day they discover they are pretty danged good. The rule everybody follows as they grow their skills, whether they know it or not is, “Fake it ‘till ya’ make it!” When I started my first job as a copywriter writing articles, I had never written an article. I wrote and rewrote this one again and again. When I turned it in, it was good enough, but just barely. The next one was better and the next one even better. That is how you get better. After a while, I could pound an article out in a day. When I caught an editor sneaking his by-line on my article, I knew I was getting pretty good. That’s how it works. You know you aren’t very good until one day you look back and see that you have become pretty good.

Research the employer before applying for the job

When you are ready, research the places you want to work and apply at those places. In any interview it will become clear through normal conversation that you have researched the employer and want to work there. That is truly impressive to them.

If you have an otherwise strong portfolio, when they ask how much you know about XML (or similar technology) you can say, “I know how it works, and I’m excited by the prospect of learning how to use it better.” That shows the desire, willingness to learn, and courage they will be seeking. Even if you don’t get the job, demonstrating those characteristics will have impressed the interviewers. In the end, this combination, by itself, is often enough to get someone hired at entry level – confidence, willingness to learn, and strongly expressed desire to be on the team.

More important than experience is the willingness (courage) to attack a demanding learning curve and push on until you have topped it. Employers are always looking for that kind of courage.

A Tangle of Professional Communication Careers

A number of these career fields overlap so that a professional communicator might do several as part of a job (e.g., a webmaster might also do Web analytics, content management, and UX analysis), but in all cases, there are also professionals who only do that one thing. Some of the careers are so new, they are barely emerging (e.g., metadata analyst, process preservationist, content quality analysis) and have little or no salary track record, but they offer obvious opportunities for the profession. I have found more than 60 career fields I can describe. Many of them overlap so much that I will cover some of them together. My descriptions are in as much depth as I can make them, but they are largely meant to give you enough meat to begin investigating for yourself. If you see something interesting, you can Google it to see how many thousands of jobs are available under the title and what skills and talents the best of those professionals offer. You can also look up the job titles in employment boards such as Indeed.com

Something you should notice is that the more skills and talents the job demands beyond writing, the greater the salary. The copywriter, who needs only to be able to type, do research, and write, might make around $55,000 per year. The content quality analyst, who needs to understand search engine optimization, landing page optimization, metadata analysis, and how to identify all of the various genres, plus a good understanding of code, can make $250,000 per year. It all depends on how much work you are prepared to put into your technical education.

Skills the Professions Demand

Become competent in the areas you find interesting. If you like design, you might find Web design and management interesting. You can apply your design skills, but you will need to become competent in Photoshop and Dreamweaver, and able to use HTML, HTML5, extensible HTML (XHTML), cascading style Sheets, and (maybe) JavaScript at some level. These skills are not that hard to learn, but at first, the learning curve can be very steep.

Other jobs will require completely different skills. Copy editing, for example, requires a thorough understanding of the mechanics of English. Editors don’t just fix spelling and grammar, however. The profession is much richer. For example, organization of ideas is important, and it is often the editor’s job to propose organizational changes to the writer. Writers often write with voices inappropriate for their specific audiences. Editors can advise writers in that area as well.

Technical documentation specialists write across a very broad spectrum of media. They publish books, instruction sets, instructional websites, and online help, often presenting the same information in these different media. Often they have to write is such a manner the information fits into each medium with minimal adjustment.

There is Something for Everybody

If you see something in this book that you think you would like to do, focus on the skills that job demands and attack that learning curve. At first, you practice the skills on your own until you think you have them dialed in pretty well. Then “fake it till you make it” in the real world doing projects for friends or relatives or for nonprofits. Once you start doing that, your experience clock begins ticking. Keep doing that and by the time you are ready for your first serious job, you will have the portfolio and experience to qualify for it.

So what Is a Talent?

Aristotle says that a man is what he does time after time. That describes how people’s talents work. A talent is a natural tendency to repeat behaviors. In many situations, risk taking is a talent. Risk takers usually can’t help themselves. Some careers (e.g., publishing, managing editing, web design) involve taking risks on a daily basis. Early adopters of new ideas or technologies are risk takers who bring new possibilities to the corporate conversation. On the other hand, in the past, risk takers have squandered away people’s nest eggs with risky investments and have brought more than a few banks to their knees. The awful recession that ran through the second decade of the 21st century was largely caused by similar risk takers. Usually, a talent will have a dark side, but dark or light it’s always a part of your personality—part of how you like to do things.

Based on that, it should be clear that a talent for one kind of job will often be a detriment for a different kind of job. A natural love of experimenting with and learning new technologies would enhance the career of an information architect, but would do nothing useful for a proofreader. With a sense of your talents, you can better identify the list of careers where you will most likely thrive.

Universal talents

Although different careers might lend themselves to different talents, some talents apply to pretty much all of the careers. Focus, for example, is the ability to work a project from beginning to end without giving in to distractions. Most projects in professional communication are fairly large, taking days, weeks, months, or even years. Moreover, they generally have critical deadlines. Getting a major project done well and on time is the professional communicator’s bread and butter.

Another universal talent in professional communication is an unquenchable hunger for new knowledge. The best professional communicators learn just for the fun of learning. They are the ones who read encyclopedias (when there were such things) just for the fun of it. Now, they spend a lot of time at YouTube and Lynda.com.

There are more talents you might exhibit, but they are more applicable to individual careers.

How do you identify your specific talents?

The Gallup organization spent decades interviewing millions of employees in an effort to discover what talents make us excellent employees. What they found is that we all have natural characteristics that we cannot change. They are just a part of what we are. Some of us happily thrive in chaos (e.g., copywriter). Some of us are risk takers (e.g., indi-book publishers). Some of us thrive in an environment where snap decisions are the norm (e.g., managing editors). In contrast, some of us are naturally comfortable in consistency, disliking chaos (e.g., proofreaders, copy editors). Some of us thrive in carefully considered strategies and are reluctant to make changes once the strategies are established (e.g., documentation specialist).

Gallup published their results in three books. One of the books is devoted to presenting hiring and management suggestions—how to look past a candidate’s experience to see his talents. This book (First Break all the Rules) is required reading in many corporations. But two of the books are relevant for helping us identify our own important professional talents: Now Discover Your Strengths (Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton, $19,89 on Amazon.com) and Strengths Finder 2.0 (Tom Rath, $15.44 on Amazon.com). The books provide access to tests that permit you to identify your top five talents, but by reading their list of 34 talents, you can see other talents that could apply to you.

An important point to take away from this segment is that no matter what talents you may exhibit, there are careers in professional communication that have your name written all over them.

Portfolio

I have already said, virtually all of the jobs I list below require that you have a portfolio of excellent work. The jobs are different with different demands, so the content of the portfolios will be different. With that in mind, after describing the job, I describe the portfolio you should take to the interview. I also explain how you can put together an excellent portfolio even if you are not currently doing professional writing.