Job search prioritization matrix
Searching for work in 2025
This blog post covers two topics:
- The state of things
- What it's like to be a technical writer right now and how we can carve out better spaces for ourselves.
- Prioritization matrix
- Skip straight down to this to get going with a tool that can make it easier to pursue your job search or career change dreams.
The state of things
It would be an understatement to say that the lives of technical writers have been destabilized by the advent of generative AI. LLMs have made it clear that many people don’t understand what we do and how much technical writers create process and maintain structures. We are more than content creators!
Technical writers can be powerful facilitators and diplomats, bridging gaps between teams, helping more of an organization see each other more clearly. People might see our large doc sites and think “too many words!” When what they don’t see is how our docs are much more succinct and equitably distributed than half remembered conversations that happen over and over, with less validation and more disruptions to SMEs' time.
Our docs are not perfect, but too often the cry of “too many notes!” can be a reflection of a) it is not the quantity, but the structure needs work, b) documentation is most needed when a person is new and the curse of knowledge can make some content seem redundant or c) it can be upsetting to see your systems more clearly. We bear witness to what is and give voice to what is quietly understood, and that can be an uncomfortable thing.
At the recent Write the Docs conference in Portland, Yanjie Niu’s talk, “The Power of Two: How Support and Documentation Teams Transform Technical Content Quality,” was an inspiring example of how the roles of technical writers should evolve. It is important for us, and our employers, to see more examples like these. If you are a technical writer with similar positive experiences, I encourage you to share them, as talks or blogs. This will help us build our case and help more of us have career trajectories.
Short term, however, many of us are doing soul searching around what to do next. This is especially true when our superpower, writing great resumes and cover letters, gets drowned out by resumes created by generative AI. There are still opportunities for our voices to punch through, but there are volume issues to contend with.
Enter the Prioritization Matrix
The Prioritization Matrix, developed by Jessica Abel as part of her Creative Focus course, has served me well when choosing what creative project to do and works for me again as I look for the next (paid) opportunity. Jessica has even used this matrix to decide what fridge to buy.
With Jessica’s permission, I’ve created a version of the matrix tailored towards job search activities. Using this matrix comes in about a quarter of the way through the course, so I’ve created some instructions tailored towards job search to help you get to a basic decision criteria.
- https://tinyurl.com/job-search-template
- This link will create your own copy
- https://tinyurl.com/job-search-prioritization
- This link will take you to the master document, where you can leave comments and provide feedback.
We are impatient humans, so you may want to jump straight into playing with the template, but you’ll get even more out of it if you try out some of the instructions!
Further reading
- Open Source, “Fanaka, A handbook for African success in the international software industry.”
- Great advice for job seekers in any part of the world.
- Contributions are welcome (and could look good on a CV)
- Bob Watson, “A look at the past to see the future of technical writing.”
- Fabrizio Ferri Benedetti, “Technical writing in 2049.”
- Not Boring Tech Writer, “Kate sounds off on docs hierarchy of needs and how we talk to ourselves.”
- Go to nine minutes in for recognizing our superpowers and giving ourselves self-compassion.
- We’ll need this self-compassion to be effective advocates for ourselves.
- Yanjie Niu
- Write the Docs talk, “The Power of Two: How Support and Documentation Teams Transform Technical Content Quality.”
- Jessica Abel https://jessicaabel.com/
- If you have a frustrated creative soul, I recommend checking out her blog, podcasts and workshops. She will give you grounded data and strategies to help you say, "Yes, I can do the thing."
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