John Paz—Senior Content Designer at Atlassian and mentoring wizard—shares his experience mentoring prospective tech writers and how you can do the same, including how to find prospective mentees, how to foster a relationship with mentees, and how mentoring can boost your own technical writing career.

Chad Lott—content marketer at Zenreach—shares his experiences as a content marketer, plus, shares tips on how technical writers can transition into the field, including how content marketing differs from technical writing, how content marketers succeed, and how technical writers can use their existing skills to transition into content marketing.

Kathleen Franks shares how you can use your skills to start writing for nonprofit organizations, including which technical writing skills best assist nonprofits, how to use your skills to advocate for nonprofits, and how to use your skills for more than just grant writing.

Jody Winter—Auckland-based technical writer of 15 years—shares how you can embrace the long game of technical writing, including how to observe and respond to changes in the field, how to respond to seasons of burnout, and how to find opportunities to ramp up your technical writing skills.

Ash Blankenship—founder at Acme Design—shares how you can find your unique perspective on technical writing to brand your work, including how to use content to build your brand, how to choose the right platform to build your brand, and how to build a tribe that believes in your approach to technical writing.

Anne Janzer—author of Writing to Be Understood—shares how technical writers can make their technical writing more interesting. We discuss where technical writers may currently miss the mark in their writing, how technical writers can use cognitive science to make their writing more interesting, and small steps technical writers can take today to begin applying the concepts.

Katie Price, instructional designer at Azusa university, on the podcast to share with us how technical writers can transition into instructional design, including what types of projects instructional designers work on, what skills you need to learn to excel in instructional design, and how to use your existing skills to transition into the field.

Kyle Taylor—Solutions Architect at FFW and President of a Denton-based technology nonprofit TechMill—shares with how you can contribute to open source projects, including how to choose the right project to contribute to, how to translate your contributions into your portfolio, and how to create open source documentation that developers will love.

Thaddeus Dieken – Technical Writer at Accuray – shares how you can get your first job in technical communication, including how to effectively search for jobs, market yourself as a qualified entry-level candidate, and how to navigate the workplace. 

Kim Campbell – Professor and Chair of Technical Communication at the University of North Texas – shares how you can begin teaching technical writing, including how to develop the right skills, adopt the right mindset for teaching, and enjoy a fulfilling career in academia. 

Michal Skowron and Pawel Kowaluk – technical writers at Guidewire Software in Kraków, Poland – about how you can survive in the dev world, including how technical writers can gain trust and respect from developers and how technical writers can start learning programming languages.

2016 was a lovely year for The Not-Boring Tech Writer podcast. We had 10 episodes with 11 guests, covering a variety of topics that truly captured the theme of the podcast: how technical writers can break the stereotype that technical writing is a boring career.

Paul Stoecklein knows documentation: As Documentation Manager at MadCap – the industry leader in documentation software – and longtime technical writer, Paul understands what does and does not work for documentation teams.

We’ve all read (and perhaps written) a boring document: the robot-like language, the walls of text. And we’re all familiar with the result: a disengaged reader who’s likely missed the message.

Knowledge – as technical writers, it’s one of our greatest assets. However, amid the information overload technical writers often face, it’s also one of the most difficult assets to acquire.

As the tech comm industry develops, technical writers must embrace a sobering truth: As Dr. Stan Dicks writes in Digital Literacy for Technical Communication, “Technical communicators who add value to their organizations do not merely write and edit documents.”

Documentation and Support teams share a common goal: to give customers the information they need to get the greatest value from a product. But despite a shared goal, consistent communication rarely follows.

We’ve all experienced the joy of community: colleagues mentor you; friends encourage you; strangers point you towards their favorite pizza shop downtown. For that moment, whether you had previous ties to each other or not, you feel that sense of community.

Understanding how your users experience your documentation is understanding UX design – which can make or break your docs’ usability. As our guest and UX designer Autumn Hood describes it: “You can’t have good technical communication without good UX design.”

Face it: sometimes, documenting software can be tricky. Not because we don’t understand the software – we get that. Nor because we can’t articulate it in layman’s terms – we’ve got that covered, too.