When I was at Sprint, we had Tech Writer (I or II, I don't remember) and Senior Tech Writer. Then after they rebanded everyone, it shifted to Tech Writer I, II and III. However, level III was virtually unattainable with the requirements built into the system. For that matter, level III anywhere in the company was very rare, but that's a different discussion. I was moved from a Senior Writer to a Writer II - no loss of pay and I'm not one to worry a whole lot about titles.
I transferred to a Process position (in the same group, also a level II) because it more accurately reflected the work I was doing, and that was the title I had when I was laid off several months ago.
What were the differences between Tech Writer II and III? Even the unattainable stuff? What did you have to know/do to become Tech Writer III, do you remember?
III was a SME (subject matter expert) level, but the requirements were written in such a way that you had to be versed in pretty much every kind of documentation software, among other things. This was difficult because we didn't have licenses for every person in the group for Adobe and our help system. If you wanted to learn the software, you either had to ask someone to give up the license or we had to dig around for the cash. Not a pretty picture.
I'm not sure we had specifics for a III-level. Nobody in our group was re-classified as one. Some of our folks attempted to map out specifics to try to figure out what HR wanted, but that movement was put on the back burner fairly quickly when it became apparent that nobody would be getting raises no matter what titles we had.
At my last company, tech writers were given the same GSA-schedule labor categories as the programmers they supported: computer systems analyst, senior computer systems analyst, management analyst. In a tech writer slot, the first two write and edit doc, and the third owns the doc and runs the junior tech writers. The next move up from that is 'project manager', which I studiously avoided, as I hate trying to herd programmers.
My current job seems to follow this trend of not actually calling a tech writer a tech writer: I was hired as 'process control analyst' and was recently promoted to 'systems administrator' - which is probably contract voodoo, as I have yet to actually administrate any systems in the conventional senses of the words.
Comments 4
I transferred to a Process position (in the same group, also a level II) because it more accurately reflected the work I was doing, and that was the title I had when I was laid off several months ago.
Reply
Reply
I'm not sure we had specifics for a III-level. Nobody in our group was re-classified as one. Some of our folks attempted to map out specifics to try to figure out what HR wanted, but that movement was put on the back burner fairly quickly when it became apparent that nobody would be getting raises no matter what titles we had.
Reply
My current job seems to follow this trend of not actually calling a tech writer a tech writer: I was hired as 'process control analyst' and was recently promoted to 'systems administrator' - which is probably contract voodoo, as I have yet to actually administrate any systems in the conventional senses of the words.
Reply
Leave a comment