Workload

The workload has been increasing rapidly and I now deal with four major tasks at work. One of these has been the first contact with CPI in a lean environment. Something that has been tricky to say the least. Not having much experience as a tech writer it´s been challenging working with a project that changes direction every week and getting larger and larger by the day. However it´s my project and I´ll be dammed if I can´t make the end result be, acceptable. By that I mean be outstanding from someone with my limited experience. Working towards telecom one might guess what companies I write for in Sweden. The most challenging task aside from getting the right technical information in time has been starting working with the range of the client’s tools and accesses. These two factors can probably take up to 50% of my time on projects. I guess there is just one thing one can do about it. Be a bit of a bitch and get in people’s faces until stuff happens. Usually literally getting into peoples face is the best way. Always arm yourself with a good smile and people skills though. Swedes and I think people in general have a real hard time saying no to people face to face when they think it´s a reasonable request.
I think to manage technical writing fast one needs two things: a good feel for structure and a way with technology or academia. One does not need to understand everything and this is where the shoe needs to fit. I think understanding is superfluous at times as a tech writer. It is great to understand, but it´s not always feasible to understand everything for every project. The important thing is to understand enough. I guess this takes one to the old dilemma of the good enough concept.
My approach is much like one would to back in school. Look at examples, analyze and re-engineer. Trying to divide your way of describing things in modules that has been proved to work will minimize chances of getting things wrong and also your creativeness. Then again how creative is a tech writer supposed to be?
It will be interesting to see how a dyslectic like me will fare throughout this project. So far all feedback has been over expectations. If I can manage my projects and my time here with good or great reviews I think I´ll give myself a pat on the back and determining I can do writing as a profession, with a little help from the spell check function and lots of read troughs ;) 

Business Man

Getting a Job

Getting a job was an interesting process of writing CVs, Cover letters and such. I finally decided to try something I never really thought I´d try. Writing. In my case, technical writing. Having taken one of those courses in technical writing back in school I figured it might be fun using my engineering background to land me a job in writing. I realized it´s a bit of a niched market in Stockholm, at least as a consultant.
In the end I ended up mainly talking to two companies, Semcon and Sigma Kudos, two companies in the same field with slightly different approaches to hiring. Semcon seems to focus more on having some kind of certified education in technical writing as its main method of measuring skill. Sigma Kudos uses a writing test as its main method of measuring skill.


I ended up with Sigma Kudos. Mostly because of chance, I think. The recruitment process went quite swiftly and I was soon on my first assignment as a technical writer.
The first few days I had time to lunge around the office for a bit while going through and online self-training videos and what not. I think this was just about my only real opportunity to admire the view from the 27^th floor. This might not sound that high but in Sweden where the skyscrapers are the dwarfish copies of large city ones the view is great. Turning around I had a 270 degree view of the horizon in the Swedish Silicon Valley (Kista). An interesting note on the name Kista is that it literally means coffin if pronounced, just as it is written. For some reason we don´t do that in this specific instance.
The reason I had a bit of lounge time would turn out to be that the work load was too high for anyone to give me a proper introduction. Something I would get my piece of as well.Somehow I feel like drunkenly singing the business man song in broken English with one of my Japanese friends right now. This is after all a bit of change in my life as a full time traveler.