How to Grow as a Technical Writer

We all want to do a good job. Some of us also want to get better at our craft for a number of reasons, either practical or slightly delusional. Those include getting a raise, strengthening our résume, or simply ending the day with a fragile feeling of satisfaction after surviving failure for the nth time. They’re all good goals, though the ways of achieving them are not always straightforward. Moreover, the path to career growth is riddled with self-doubt and impostor syndrome.

Yes, growing can be both exhilarating and painful.

What follows are the personal traits and skills that, in my opinion, will make you grow as a technical writer. They’re based on my personal experience going from technical writer to principal technical writer at small, medium-sized, and big companies. While my list is not fully aligned with any of the career ladders I climbed, side-stepped, or reinterpreted, it overlaps significantly with most of them, or at least pushed their boundaries in unexpected ways. Consider this post a confession.

Prerequisites: A moment for honest self-assessment

Your motivation for growing doesn’t really matter as long as you’re working to grow towards a goal. Some motivators are extrinsic (better pay, increased job security, more recognition), while others are intrinsic (increased self-perceived competence, decreased performance anxiety, and so on). All of them are valid. All of them are excellent excuses for pushing yourself a bit more, if that’s what you want. The ethics of growing begin to matter only when you’re growing against others. Don’t do that, don’t grow despite or against other people, it’s messy and silly.

But before going on, a sanity check: I’m assuming that at some point you chose tech writing as a career, or that at the very least you grew to like it; that you’re working for a reasonably fair employer; that you find tech comms to be engaging and important; and that you have a reasonably clear perception of your own skills and motivations. If none of the previous points check, go no further. If you’re enduring some of the many circumstances that might make work undesirable or unbearable, don’t seek growth, seek change.

What does becoming a “senior” or “principal” mean anyway?

Let’s cast aside all considerations about the way career ladders are designed or their (often unfortunate) choice of terminology. There is no single definition of seniority in the workplace, especially in tech. In general, most companies will agree on describing a senior-level individual contributor as someone who is able to work without guidance and tackle complex tasks and projects with little supervision, doing what’s best to support the product and the teams behind it. It’s an obviously uncontroversial and bland take.

Even though seniority is sometimes awarded based on tenure, that’s rarely the norm in tech. However honorable or meaningful the passing of time may be, it doesn’t always equate to skill or merit. In this sense, we ought to talk about two types of seniority: Stagnant and Dynamic. Only the latter, with its stepped pattern, signals the kind of growth that helps you achieve goals or that should lead to promotions. The Stagnant line, on the other hand, can be read as the little death of ambition. Here’s a plot that describe both trends visually:

So, to answer the original question, becoming a “senior” or “principal” on the job might mean many things depending on how you attain it or how it’s awarded, but those sobriquets don’t always correspond to the effective level of competence, which, in turn, is not a function of time alone. The kind of pattern that I’m going to describe and advocate for is the Dynamic seniority one, which involves periods of growth followed by short plateaus of stabilization and pathfinding. Growing involves qualitative change, not just quantitative.

Let me add that the kind of ideal, stepped growth of the Dynamic seniority line can only be achieved under optimal circumstances. Life happens: the line is aspirational. As a tech writer, I would describe my own career as a mix of Dynamic and Stagnant, or Dynamic but with plateau periods that lasted longer than I would have liked them to last. That’s completely normal. There are moments for growth and moments for regrouping and resting.

This is not a damn hustle culture pamphlet, for HTML’s sake.

I’ve some bad news: The amount of work you pull is never enough

As impressive as it might look, being incredibly productive is not the best way to grow. It signals that you’ve become extremely proficient at a number of tasks and hit a performance ceiling. You’ll be seen as a dependable, if a bit greedy colleague, ready to devour tickets and clean the backlog, which is good when you’re a junior and want to grow into a mid-level position. That’s all there is to it though: You’ll be stuck in a never ending cycle of business-as-usual activities, away from impact.

For many folks, that’s OK. If growing is not on your to-do list, keeping the engine greased and pumping is valuable. Let me repeat this again, though: growth requires qualitative change, not only quantitative. In a field like technical writing, that means finding new ways of solving novel problems and tackling issue generators at the source. Instead of addressing hundreds of feedback tickets every month, for example, you could work on docs that would prevent those from the start.

So, if growth is about qualitative change, what are the traits or skills that a tech writer should possess or exhibit in order to grow and, tangentially, get recognition at work? I’ve thought of some traits and behaviors that show qualitative growth based on my experience. Even though they apply to more professions, I’m going to frame them in a tech writing context. The three principles that guide them all are restlessness, courage, and generosity.

Or, to quote one of my favorite books, it all boils down to being a captain.

“That is a fair lord and a great captain of men. If Gondor has such men still in these days of fading, great must have been its glory in the days of its rising.”

Legolas about Prince Imrahil

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Last Debate, The Return of the King

Become a communicator and advocate of your craft

Your voice must be heard. Inside of your work, you need key stakeholders and teams to know what it is that you do and the value you bring to product development. Your docs are vital infrastructure, but folks won’t realize that until it’s too late. Unless, of course, you become an ambassador of your craft and start making yourself heard and present everywhere. One of the first things I did when I joined a startup was sending an email to the team telling them what I did. It became my first post.

Outside of work, this task is equally important, because tech writing has a depth issue. You must develop a sense of pride in technical communication as a vital discipline. Don’t shy away from intellectual engagement and contribute to the field by sharing your own thoughts, theories, and errors. Some career ladders label that as “thought leadership”. It’s really about showing up and owning the conversation around what we do and why it matters, moving beyond praxis to noesis.

Think deeply about what you’re doing, then act accordingly

Perhaps one of the most significant shifts is moving from passive autopilot to active, critical reflection. It’s easy to get caught in the rhythm of daily tasks and content yourself with your merry garden of words, but genuine growth requires stepping back and consciously thinking about what you’re doing, why you’re doing it that way, and whether there are better, more impactful approaches. This is the antithesis of the Stagnant seniority trend that I described.

Start by engaging with your work on a deeper level, perhaps developing your own frameworks (like I did here as an experiment) or articulating the principles behind effective tech writing. Move beyond executing tasks to understanding the systemic implications of your work. Your work is more valuable and more transformative than you might think. And before you ask: No, there’s never a good time for this, only the sudden pang of urgency. As I wrote here, seek the storms.

Forge new paths and encourage others

Finding new paths means seeking out or even creating novel solutions to documentation challenges. Consider, for example, the impact of strategically integrating AI to enhance specific parts of the documentation lifecycle. Growth happens when you’re the first to venture into new territories, test their efficacy, and demonstrate their value. Sometimes, even silly experiments can hold value when you share findings and artifacts. There are no silly questions.

Now, you can be a Woz and invent a splendid contraption in your basement, but it won’t be useful to anyone if you don’t socialize it. You have to be a master of working with others, mentoring your colleagues and the wider community in adopting the improved methods, be they new tools or frameworks. Demystify the new tools, share the “why” behind the change, and provide support. This elevates the capabilities of the entire team and contributes to the evolution of the profession itself.

Embrace perpetual learning and bold experimentation

Tech never sits still, and neither should you. A mark of dynamic seniority is an insatiable, almost journalistic appetite for what’s new, and a commitment to not just keeping up, but actively exploring the frontiers of our field. Never stop the learning process and constantly challenge yourself with new tools, technologies (hello, LLMs and AI), and methodologies. Settling forever for one technology you know well (for example, DITA) is unwise when it comes to growth.

Does this mean that you should chase all the latest shiny objects without thinking? Not at all. You should tailgate them, study them, report your findings, and then decide whether you want to use them or not. My passion for leveraging LLMs at work, for example, hasn’t turned me into a mindless GPT drone: I could pen a quasi-convincing rebuttal of AI-generated documentation because of my knowledge of LLMs. In other words, even to criticize something effectively you’ve to know it first.

Find the courage to speak up

There’s a quiet power in observation, but growth demands that we translate those observations into action, and that frequently means speaking up. This might be about challenging a process that isn’t serving users, questioning an assumption that could lead to poor docs, or advocating for resources that will genuinely improve the quality of information. This is what Tom Johnson brought up in Speaking up and calling out bullshit when you see it. Quoting from his excellent post:

Calling out bullshit should be in our tech writer’s DNA. We shouldn’t hesitate to voice concerns, even when it leads to awkward or uncomfortable situations, as this is part of the constitution of knowledge. Remaining quiet does a disservice to truth. If you love truth/knowledge or even right decisions, take that uncomfortable step and speak up.

Speaking up isn’t comfortable nor fun. It requires courage and a willingness to disrupt the status quo. It might alienate some folks, but rest assured that those who get it will follow you, because it’s only through acts of principled engagement that real positive change can occur. Senior and principal writers understand that their perspective is valuable and that their silence can be a missed opportunity for improvement.

Time to chart your course, captain

This confession isn’t a map with a clearly marked X for treasure. If it were that easy, we’d all be principal-level polymaths with corner offices and unlimited stationery budgets. This journey of qualitative growth is deeply personal, often messy, and non-linear. I faced times of exhilarating progress and frustrating plateaus, times I felt like a fair lord and a great captain, and other times when I just tried to keep the ship afloat.

What I hope these reflections offer is a set of beacons rather than a rigid itinerary. Becoming a communicator and advocate, thinking deeply, finding new paths, embracing learning, and finding the courage to speak up are not checklist items but ongoing practices fueled by that restless curiosity, courage, and generosity.

Which of these currents are you ready to navigate next?