Laura Novich, Author at Our Best Words

Today, it is becoming more important to become a qualified technical writer.

More than 75% of technical writers worldwide have moved into technical writing as a pivot. Career changers bring their expertise in many different fields to their new careers in technical communication . They use their qualifications from other industries to broaden their vision and understanding of the role. As most technical writers have different professional backgrounds, they often lack any degree in Technical Communication and instead have a certificate from a local training facility.

Pivoting into TechComm

Jordan has a BSc in computer science and a background in software development. He moved to Israel recently and decided that he wanted to change his career. Combining his love for technology and for writing in English, he decided that technical communication was the answer. He completed his courses at an online training facility and received a certificate as a technical communicator. He quickly found a position and his career has grown along with his knowledge. He is now a sought-after candidate for technical writing positions in Israel’s dynamic hi-tech market.

Becoming a Qualified Technical Writer

Olivia was a freelance translator who was looking for better job security. She found an internship program, took some classes, and started her career in Technical Communication. For Olivia, an internship gave her the experience, while the courses gave her additional practice. The mentors that Olivia worked with hired her to work as a junior technical writer and a few years later, she was promoted to a senior writer’s job. Shedecided after a few years to become an independent contractor and to take advantage of the “gig economy” during the pandemic. She took a class to get certified in technical communication so that her experience could be ratified by international authority and give companies across the EU a reason to consider her. Today, she has clients knocking on her door and feels that her training and certification, in combination with her experience, gives her a big advantage over the competition.

Investing in Professional Development

Tania has a BA in journalism and media and decided to take a training program in technical communication to give her additional advantage in the job market. For the past 8 years, she has worked as a technical writer for a start-up ad-tech company. Tania was worried her skills would start to stagnate if she didn’t invest in her personal development. She wasn’t sure how much longer the start-up would last. She wanted to make sure that, if something happened to the company, she would be ready to enter the job market as a desirable candidate. So, Tania took some additional classes and also decided to certify in Technical Communications. When her company decided to close, thanks to her new skills and experience, Tania quickly had several relevant offers from large companies.

Jordan, Olivia and Tania have one thing in common. All of them are certified in technical communications by ITCQF, the International Technical Communication Qualification Foundation.

What is ITCQF?

ITCQF, the International Technical Communication Qualification Foundation, is a non-profit organization committed to professionalizing the industry by certifying technical writers all over the world. They have set an international standard for technical writing, just as the International Software Testing Qualifications Board ISTQB does for QA professionals and IEEE does for engineers. Their examinations are set and monitored by the GASQ.

The ITCQF certification never expires and is recognized all over the world. ITCQF training centers provide courses to prepare their students for the certification exam. All training sessions are delivered by instructors who are ITCQF accredited.

ITCQF certified professionals can be found working in leading companies around the globe, including: Google, Motorola Solutions, Siemens, and Atlassian. Once you become part of this elite network, you will have many more colleagues you can collaborate with, and who can provide you with work opportunities.

Why should I get certified in Technical Communications?

The ITCQF certification is an internationally known and accepted certificate administered by the GASQ. Their standards are set by leaders in technical communication and their certificate never needs to be renewed. This certificate qualifies you for the job title of technical writer and gives you formal proof that you have been taught the necessary skills for the profession. An international certificate will give you international recognition in the job market, and employers will turn to you over other non-certified candidates. As more certified individuals enter the job market, certification will become a requirement. Having it now puts you at an advantage among an elite group of individuals who have decided to achieve international recognition for themselves in the technical communication profession.

Today, many companies are looking for qualified technical writers. You can open the door to higher-paid opportunities with a certificate from the ITCQF. Walk into that interview with confidence in your skills and something more to talk about. Internationally, certification is going to become a requirement for the job, so it is only a matter of time before this becomes a requirement in Israel’s competitive market. Don’t be the last person to invest in your own career development!

Where can I take an ITCQF course?

There are ITCQF training centers in 12 countries including the US, Australia, the UK, India, and across Europe. Companies often have technical writers scattered between their workspaces, so they have training facilities for this certification path in multiple locations, which makes getting certified easier than ever. This international certification program is now available online from Israel, with live online courses open to anyone anywhere in the world for whom the synchronous evening classes are convenient.

Our Best Words, the only accredited training organization for the ITCQF in Israel, is leading the way to training technical writers to become qualified and certified. The Our Best Words online training program teaches you everything you need to know to pass the certification exam. The ITCQF course can be taken by experienced techcomm professionals as a stand-alone course, or at the end of of our flagship Technical Communications Foundations training program.

What are you waiting for?

Becoming a qualified technical writer is the easiest way to set yourself apart from the competition. The ITCQF certification program provides the most advantages since it meets industry-wide standards. If you aspire to break into international markets, you will have many more opportunities through becoming an ITCQF certified technical writer. You will know that your skills and knowledge are backed by a respected international organization. Your employers will be satisfied that their content is safe in your very capable hands. Here in Israel, you will join an elite group of individuals who feel that certification from ITCQF is an essential step in qualifying your skills in a larger arena.

Click here for more information or sign up TODAY for the ITCQF Online Training Course.

Looking back, 2020 was filled with uncertainty and trepidation. Would we be able to open a Technical Communication class at Our Best Words on Zoom? Would Covid-19 allow our students to work and study? How many would lose their jobs? How many would get sick? So many questions, and at the beginning there were very few answers.

As the year progressed, we discovered that not only did we have enough students to teach, but we also had four successful internships and amazing final projects. Our students were challenged intellectually and technically. They learned complex concepts, complicated tools, and how to create workflows and diagrams. In the end, we persevered and rose to the challenge. They all successfully completed their projects and their work speaks for itself.

As a part of my Advanced Software Documentation module, my students learned about open source software and learned how to document APIs. I admit that I was a bit skeptical about bringing something so complicated to my students. API documentation is not for everyone. An Application Program Interface is an interpreter between two devices or endpoints, similar to a waiter who interfaces between the kitchen and the customer. Almost every software company uses APIs or develops them, so understanding how an API works and how to document it would be an advantage for any junior technical writer who is learning the tools of the trade.

If you have never looked at code, it can be quite difficult to really understand and document APIs correctly. I decided to use the open source philosophy and to ask the community for help. I contacted the Write the Docs group and they gave me so many ideas that I wasn’t sure how to use all of them!

Alex Fiedler offered to share his API Documentation Exercise and was always available to answer questions. His exercise was more complicated than I wanted, so I simplified it by restricting the choices, but I didn’t simplify the code. This modified exercise was the final project for the API mini-course, which was part of the larger Advanced Software Documentation course at Our Best Words.

Once I had the content, I decided that the API mini-course was too short to allow me to teach a new API documentation tool such as Swagger or Postman. As the content was going to be hosted on GitHub, I wanted to give my students Markdown templates for writing the docs. The community answered this need as well. The Good Docs Project has templates for many kinds of docs including API documentation. Their templates include a readme which explains how to use each kind of template. It is written in Markdown and hosted on GitHub. Check it out and contribute to making the project better!

Whenever I had a question, the Slack group at Write the Docs was more than ready to help. Special mention to Alyssa Rock and Chris Ward, who were more than helpful in answering questions with patience and care.

So, if you have read this article to the end and are wondering how you can learn to write API documentation, here are some tips:

If you want to learn the course with an instructor, Our Best Words offers a mini-course in API documentation as part of their Advanced Software Documentation course.
If you want to teach yourself, there are some courses which are really good. Tom Johnson has a blog called I’d Rather be Writing.
Learn a bit of JSON, REST, or Python. You don’t need to know how to write a program but you do need to know how to read and analyze one. In the same way that a psychologist learns statistics in order to be able to understand correlations, a technical writer needs to be able to read code snippets and understand what they do.
Showcase your work. Use the static site generator from GitHub to create a website of your docs. If that is not an option, just host it on GitLab or GitHub.

Technical Communication Courses

Laura Novich MSc, Advanced TC Skills Lecturer

Laura Novich entered into technical writing in 1997 and has worked in both startups and fortune 500 companies in diverse fields such as virtualization, cybersecurity, and enterprise cloud solutions on both Windows and Linux platforms. Laura is a regular contributor to “Open Source” magazine, is a founding member of “Write the Docs Israel”, and is highly recognized for her contributions and maintenance to Fedora’s open-source documentation (in KVM). She is a frequent presenter at MEGAComm and has had speaking engagements at the Red Hat KVM forum and has attended several hackathons. Laura has won the prestigious Red Hat EXCeed award for her outstanding collaboration work as well as the 3Com 3Award for her outstanding work in managing the ATM documentation project. In her current role, Laura is building and managing an open-sourced documentation community at ScyllaDB, where developers, customers, and open-source activists can contribute.

Laura’s diverse career history includes educating new immigrants in English (ESL). In this capacity, she was selected to be a curriculum writer for her school district and a teacher trainer for the NY state ESL aptitude test (NYSESLAT).

Laura has a rich set of hobbies and volunteer work, which includes being a mentor for FIRST robotics teams, genealogy, baking, and cake decoration. In addition, Laura is currently documenting her grandfather’s extraordinary life and together with her husband, Jason they manage and maintain a community library with over 2,000 titles.

Laura has both a B.Sc. in psychology an M.Sc. in TESOL and is a licensed English teacher (K-12) in Israel and the USA. Laura is a Red Hat Certified System Administrator.

In the movie The Secret of My Success, Brantley Foster (played by Michael J. Fox) expresses exactly the thought that goes through every graduates’ mind: “How can I get any experience until I get a job that gives me experience?”

The hardest thing to do when starting a new career, is to get experience. Often this creates a paradox. How do you get work with no experience, and how do you get experience with no work?

In the world of open source software, this conundrum is a bit less daunting because your experience is what you make of it. By working with Open Source projects – sponsored by open source software (OSS) companies – you gain experience working on projects you like, for companies which make you feel you are important, and then you use that experience to help you find employment.

Most companies would never allow newbies to touch their intellectual property and collateral without signing a NDA or going through some kind of training or security check. However, when your source code is open and anyone in the world can contribute to it (in addition to copy it and use it), this is no longer an issue. In fact, open source companies embrace their contributors and create communities where students can easily get their feet wet and find their way in coding, testing, and documentation. Most open source companies depend on the contributions of others to get work done. This means that the contributors work for free, simply because they want to. For students, it translates into an unpaid internship and getting some real-world experience.

At Our Best Words, we decided to run a pilot project to see if our students could work in an open source documentation project and find the experience beneficial to jump starting their new careers in technical communication.

I was the initiator and point of contact for the project and I approached several companies. The one company which gave us the most positive response was GitLab. GitLab is a company who creates software for Git repository management, issue tracking, and CI/CD (continuous integration / continuous delivery) pipeline management. Their software is used by hundreds of thousands of organizations worldwide and in 2019 they announced that they had achieved $100 Million of ARR (annual recurring revenue).

I was contacted by Mike Jang of GitLab and he connected me with Marcin Sedlak-Jakubowski and Marcia Dias Ramos who were located closer to OBW’s offices in Israel. Following the meeting, the details were hammered out and everyone had their tasks to do in order to launch the pilot in mid-September. Mike, Marcia, and Marcin hand-picked 19 issues for the students to solve. Each issue would be tagged Tich-Tov-only for OBW students, and any contributor who was not an OBW student would not be allowed to work on the issue.

To prepare the students, I held several demonstrations with GitLab. The students had never used the software before and some were quite nervous. As the backbone of GitLab is Git, a software tool which the students were already familiar with, it wasn’t too hard to learn. Following the demonstrations, I sent the students a link to a Google drive folder with tutorials, a FAQ, and other valuable resources.

The issues the students were assigned came from GitLab’s documentation. The documentation is written in Markdown and is checked with a linter (a static code analysis tool) called Vale. The student’s assignments were to fix issues that the Vale linter had found. The changes included: fixing spelling, grammar, usage, and voice. In some cases however, entire pages had to be re-written.

As I wanted this project to run smoothly and successfully, we decided to limit the pilot to 7 of our 14 students. This allowed me to manage the project more closely, and to make sure each student had only 2-3 issues to handle during the 2 month time period that the project was active for.

The OBW students who were part of this project (with links to their GitLab profiles) were:

We worked mostly during the months of September and October and wrapped up the project in November. Each issue the students had was put on a Trello Kanban board. We had regular standup meetings where we discussed what we were doing and discussed any issue which was causing difficulty. There were many teachable moments where I would help with repository issues, troubleshooting issues for the merge requests, and helping the students understand technical writing theories in practice.

November came faster than we thought it would and looking back, the project ended way too quickly. About midway in, I collected feedback from Marcin, Marcia, and Mike and they told me that the experience for them was a positive one. They told us that once we were done, we could if we wanted, take on more issues than the original allotment which had been assigned to the group.

One student in particular did just that. That student was Rachel Gottesman. She completed 33 Merge requests and helped rewrite pages of GitLab’s documentation. She was so instrumental for the 13.7 release, that GitLab announced that Rachel is the MVP for the release! We at OBW couldn’t be more thrilled! Congratulations Rachel!

Rachel’s name will appear on GitLab’s MVP page. The announcement for the release is in this blog post.

Our semester has ended and our students are graduating and will soon find employment. We are gearing up for our new year and a new course. We plan to run this project again as part of our Software Documentation for TC Professionals course.

If you are interested in learning more about this valuable internship opportunity, come to the Our Best Words Open House Event on Sunday, January 10. Click here for more information. We look forward to meeting you!

Laura Novich is Our Best Words’ Advanced TC Skills Lecturer. Read her full profile here.

Author: Laura Novich

The ITCQF Certificate: Your Path to a Successful Career in Technical Communication