The fact you are taking this course says your are at least tentatively interested in employment or career as a technical writer. The discussion and links below give you a tour of the technical communication landscape.
Society for Technical Communication. STC has been around for a long time. Some feel it has grown stuffy and unfriendly. Plus its membership has fallen in the last ten years. But a good resource!
Write-the-Docs. This is a new organization, fresh and fun.
TechWhirl. You could do no better than to read around in the archives, the forums, the articles. This is best resource for technical writers.
r/technicalwriting. Postings at reddit.com.
Summary Report for: 27-3042.00 - Technical Writers. From O*Net Online.
Technical Writing World. Community and resources.
ClickHelp Technical Writing Blog. From Armenia!
Technical Communication Resources. I have built this list but it needs rework because a lot of links are now dead.
x Business, Government & Technical Communications at Austin Community College.
Bentley College. Information Design and Corporate Communication Degree
Texas Tech. BA in Technical Communication
Utah State University. Professional and Technical Writing emphasis, English Department.
U of Washington. Human Centered Design and Engineering (formerly Technical Communication)
Michigan Tech. Scientific and Technical Communication
U of Minnesota. BS in Technical Writing & Communication
Exercise caution about the word "Certified." There is no nationally or internationally recognized entity that certifies technical writers in the way that CPAs, engineers, nurses, MDs and others are certified. Instead when you complete the courses required by the institution, you will have a "certificate" from whatever the participating college is. And that's good. Quick certificates became The Thing after 2000 or so. In a job interview, you don't want to get cornered on your assumptions about certification.
STC has debated certification for a long while and has developed an exam. You might check the "Certification" link at http://www.stc.org/—as of June 2018, I do not know how well it has been received, but I am not seeing it in job postings for technical writers.
Brainbench.com offers technical writing certification that is quite extensive for $49.95 (US) as opposed to the STC exam which costs $278 US (STC members), $550 US (nonmembers) as of January 2021.
Austin Community College's Business, Government & Technical Communications program and JER Online have some good affordable courses and certificates for technical writing.
Krista Van Laan. Insider's Guide to Technical Writing. XML Press, 2013.
Microsoft. Microsoft Writing Style Guide. This replaces the technical style guide which you had to pay for.
Sun Technical Publishing. ReadMe First! ISBN: 9780137058266
Alan S. Pringle, Sarah S. O'Keefe. Technical Writing 101: A Real-World Guide to Planning and Writing Technical Content. Kindle at amazon.com ($0.99); Scriptorium Publishing Services, ISBN 9780970473363 ($21.57)
Alan S. Pringle, Sarah S. O'Keefe. Content Strategy 101: Transform Technical Content into a Business Asset. Scriptorium Publishing Services, Kindle at amazon.com: ASIN B009HX2J5K ($0.99); Amazon paperback: ISBN 9780982811849
Gerald J. Alred, Charles T. Brusaw and Walter E. Oliu. Handbook for Technical Writing. St. Martin's Press. Any recent edition.
Anne Gentle. Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation. XML Press, 2012.
The best two ways to see which job skills are current is to do both the following:
Go to indeed.com and subscribe to job searches for things like technical writer, information developer, content developer, as well as software you are experienced systems with such as MadCap Flare, Adobe FrameMaker, and DITA. You'll receive almost-daily job listings in e-mail.
LinkedIn.com. For example, search on technical writer.
SimplyHired.com is another job site that features technical-writer jobs.
Go to the Society for Technical Communication site STC Communities. To explore chapter websites, click on a chapter name then click on its website. The individual chapter websites vary in their organization, but you'll see some combination of employers, job postings, and tech writer resumes.
For example, if you go to the Austin chapter and click Employment, you see employer information, job information, and tech writer resumes. ClearanceJobs.com is a good resource for technical writing work in the military as a DoD contractor—if you have the clearance.
To get employed as a technical writer, it may help to set up a LinkedIn page for yourself with your credentials clearly indicated. Mention genres you have written in (user guides, helps, SOPs, etc.), software you've used, and other such detail. A good idea too is to set up an online portfolio with the same sort of specific detail. You can use WIX, Weebly, Google, and others to set up online portfolios for free.
Top 20 Technical Writing Blogs and Websites To Follow in 2018
My favorite is Tom Johnson's idratherbereading. Listed above in the Top 20.
Another favorite is Jacob Moses's The Not-Boring Tech Writer Podcast. A variety of articles, many at an entry level.
Not so much a blog as a purveyor technical communication webinars, which are recorded and archived: The Content Wrangler. Listed above in the Top 20.
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