After you’ve successfully applied to a job, gotten hired, and made it through your first year, what’s next? Over time, you’ll learn new skills and take on new responsibilities. As you progress in your career, you’ll eventually need to choose between two career tracks: the individual contributor (IC) track or the management track, or possibly a combination of both.

We’ve identified four fundamental levels of seniority in technical writing: junior (entry-level), technical writer (intermediate), senior (advanced), and manager (people leader).

In different organizations, countries and industries, these roles may go by different names. Some organizations with extensive and mature technical writing departments might have numerous grades and role classifications, and some smaller organizations might simply have one role: technical writer.

We’ve included some general guidelines below as to the typical qualifications and experience for entering these roles. Remember, there’s no hard and fast rule. Don’t think you can’t be a senior technical writer or manager simply because you don’t have many years of experience.

Also, don’t be worried if you do have many years of experience and you’re not a senior writer. Many seasoned technical writers simply prefer to focus on producing great work without the additional mentorship and people leadership roles that a senior job title carries.

Voice of Practitioner

Amanda Role: Technical Documentation Manager with 10 years’ experience Location: Texas, United States “These days I see a trend to avoid ‘minimum qualifications,’ ‘years of experience,’ or anything that could gatekeep candidates from roles due to privilege or lack thereof. We’re trying to get people in who can demonstrate that they have the skills they need to do the job rather than a specific qualification, like through coding bootcamps.”

The Individual Contributor (IC) Track

Many (if not most) technical writers are individual contributors (ICs). This simply means they don’t manage other people, which suits a lot of folks just fine, even those who have many years of experience.

What Does That Mean?

Individual Contributor (IC) Individual contributor (IC) is industry jargon for someone who doesn’t manage other people.

The number of levels, or grades, in the individual contributor career path usually depends on the size of the organization. Here’s an example of a typical IC career path:

1. Junior technical writer
2. Technical writer
3. Senior technical writer

Large organizations may have additional roles beyond senior: staff, principal, or lead, for instance. It’s worth your while to check that you understand the seniority of the role correctly.

Note

Job Titles at Small Organizations Start-ups and small organizations often have a single technical writing role. In that case, your title may stay “Technical Writer” throughout your time at the company, even if your role grows and you take on additional responsibilities.

Junior Technical Writer Roles

As a junior technical writer, you should focus on developing your skillset through experience. It’s okay to make mistakes! Your manager and more senior technical writers should be there to review your work before it gets published and give you feedback on how you can improve.

What else should you expect as a junior technical writer?

• You should receive tasks from your manager that are manageable within your developing skillset, such as for a single product or component, or a simple business process.
• Your manager or a senior technical writer should familiarize you with your organization’s documentation process, systems and repository, style guide, and templates.
• Your manager should introduce you to subject matter experts, give you clear guidance for tasks, set expectations around the document review process and timelines, and make themselves or a senior technical writer available to answer your questions.
• You will contribute to (and may even own) a section of the documentation or a small set of relatively straightforward documents.
• As you move through the levels, you’ll learn to work more autonomously. You’ll eventually be able to make informed suggestions about how to fix bugs in software products, tweak features to improve their usability, or improve business processes.

The difference between a junior writer and a senior writer is not how well you write or even how long you’ve been in the industry. The difference is how independent you are, the depth of your expertise and product or organizational knowledge, and how much you influence others in the course of your work.

Senior Technical Writer Roles

As a senior technical writer, you will be expected to be a master of your craft with a deep understanding not just of technical writing principles, but of the technology of your industry and your organization’s unique products and processes.

What else should you expect as a senior technical writer?

• You should work with your manager and subject matter experts to set your own tasks and priorities, negotiate with them to set realistic deadlines, and proactively let folks know if things change, for example,if it’s looking like that deadline you set is now out of reach.
• You should be comfortable making recommendations to improve technical writing processes, the company style guide, definitions of terminology within the organization’s dictionary, and anything you think may negatively affect the user experience in products you’re documenting.
• You will use your knowledge to mentor and coach junior writers, giving them feedback and peer reviews on their work before it’s published, answering their questions about their craft, guiding them so they understand what’s expected, and upskilling them on the organization’s systems, products, and processes.

As a senior writer, you will have the opportunity to “choose your own adventure”—even beyond technical writing. You may choose to go deep and learn everything about a product or technology and become an expert yourself, opening up opportunities to advance your career in fields such as product management. Or you may “go guru” and build your reputation and qualifications as an expert technical writer—perhaps even embracing a role such as an educator, passing on to others your advanced mastery of the craft.

For other examples of career paths, see Career Ladders for Documentation on https://career-ladders.dev/, and another example is the Technical Writer and Technical Writing Management levels in https://handbook.gitlab.com/.

The Management Track

Some technical writers manage teams of writers. These folks are usually called technical documentation managers, though they can also be called documentation leads or lead technical writers. Even more senior technical writing roles exist, where you will be expected to manage other managers, such as technical communications director and head of technical communication, all the way up to vice president, technical publications.

Don’t think of the management track as a promotion over the IC track or a recognition of superior technical writing skills. It’s a distinct career path with its own set of soft and hard skills that combine elements of industry and organizational knowledge, people leadership, strategy, project management, and process management. In fact, some people who aren’t the strongest writers might be terrific managers—the two are very different skillsets.

As a manager of other writers, you’ll most likely find you’ll do less writing, but it will help your credibility and make it easier to empathize with your technical writing team if you set aside time to do some writing.

That being said, expect to focus most of your time on developing your leadership skills. Being a great leader means giving your writers the support they need to consistently produce high-quality documentation in a timely manner and building your team’s processes so that turning out excellent documentation and meeting deadlines is as frictionless as possible for your team.

What else should you expect as a technical documentation manager?

• Assign tasks to writers of all seniority levels on the team and help writers prioritize their tasks.
• Track progress to ensure everyone is on schedule and any delays are promptly communicated.
• Provide different levels of supervision depending on the complexity of the assignment.
• Set expectations about each person’s role on the team, responsibilities, and deliverables.
• Help remove obstacles that are blocking the writing team from creating good documentation.
• Resolve interpersonal issues between the writers, or between writers and their stakeholders.
• Assess the performance of team members, recognize and celebrate achievements, and address performance issues.
• Interview and hire new technical writers.