Re: EX: How much job hopping is OK and how to explain it?

[Candace Bamber <cbamber -at- CASTEK -dot- COM>]

Archie queried:
>If you are a TW for a particular company and a lot of what you learn/
>learned could pan out in another (same kind of business) would employer
>actually consider the TW as sort of a Renaissance figure?

My employer would (and does). But I understand our hiring model for
techwriters
is a little odd.  In our current group, we have only 2.5 positions for
"career"
techwriters - people who want to build a career writing, and follow the
"usual-ish" TW career path of junior TW, intermediate TW, senior TW, lead
TW.
Everybody else (between 6 and 14 FTEs depending on the time) is on a career
path
leading to business analyst, technical analyst, development team lead, test
team
lead, application architect, technical architect, implementation project
manager, etc. The company realized (as all companies should!) that we TWs
were
among the very few in the whole company who have good technical knowledge,
good
knowledge of our business vertical and global knowledge of our application
products (the developers only know their "slice" of the software). (We also
have
good communications skills and an "excess of personality" which tend to make
us
more visible than some  other groups in the company!)

That's led to a second consequence, which I call "pass through" staffing -
we
grow people for a lot of different roles in the company by passing them
through
the TW team: eg, a developer who wants to be an application architect might
fasttrack by doing a 4-6 month stint with us before going on to a business
analyst role, enroute to the architecture route. The core TW team (7 people)
are
always moving out into different roles. I was worried at first that this
approach might degrade the quality of the docs (remember the many "can you
teach
a techie to be a writer" threads?), but if anything it improves them - the
writers teach the techies to write better (and we have a strong editorial
review
process), and the techies teach the writers about the content (technology
and
functionality), so they become better analysts. An nobody gets bored. When I
hear the words "we're going to have to staff this project from your team" I
get
happy, because it validates my vision of the value TWs should have in a
company.

I definitely consider myself a renaissance figure: today I'm helping a
project
team do some insurance product analysis, continuing to plan my own
implementation project which starts up in three weeks, prep'ing for an
advanced
course I will be teaching in September, leading  teams writing two RFI's for
the
business development group, working through the TW team budgets, and packing
for
a week of requirements-gathering interviews in San Francisco next week.

I know there are many TWs who would hate this model. But everyone on the
team
loves it - which is why they are here. One of the upsides of the whole TW
thing
these days is that it comes in many flavours. It's just a matter of finding
the
company  that likes pistachio-licorice as much as you do.

Candace
**********************************
Candace Bamber
cbamber -at- castek -dot- com

Castek
--Putting the Future Together
**********************************

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