Some of these results may shock you
Job Outlook 2020: Technical Writing
What you need to know before looking for a new job
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 55,700 technical writers in 2018. BLS projected an 8% growth which means, at the time of this writing there are around 65,000 technical writers in 2020.
Technical writers research and create instruction manuals, how-to guides, and other supporting technical information for a variety of fields.
Because of the fast growth for a relatively small field I was interested in seeing what the actual job outlook looked for someone in the current economy. To my surprise, there was a lot.
A quick LinkedIn search for technical writing for the United States resulted in 35,449 hiring jobs, which is a little over half of the entire industry. I found this rather interesting as there is a huge growth opportunity for people interested in joining the field or people looking to transition careers.
LinkedIn has a filter option and for the search “technical writing” the results were as followed:
- Internship: 386
- Entry Level: 12,437
- Associate: 13,040
- Mid-Senior Level: 4,981
- Director: 686
- Executive: 136
There is a great opportunity write now for recent college graduates or people outside of the technical writing field to join.
Searching for a technical writer yielded 3,122 jobs, but a documentation specialist resulted in 3,737 jobs. I found the difference rather stark. I usually prefer the term technical writer and that is what I have listed on my resume. I would not have thought to look for documentation specialist. The point being, if you are looking for jobs changing up the key words will help.
Software
I wanted to see what else I could find about current job trends in the technical writing field, specifically from the software side.
Some skill needed to standout as a technical writer in the software industry are: APIs, SDKs, XML DITA, Markdown, AsciiDocs, and some sort of knowledge in programming.
Since technical writing had the biggest set of jobs I decided I was going to look for jobs that were looking for those key words.
The results actually shocked me:
- API: 2531
- SDK: 139
- XML: 1482
- DITA: 72
- XML DITA: 26
- Markdown: 63
- AsciiDocs: 0
- JavaScript: 2790
- Python: 3096
- HTML: 1389
- Java: 3432
- Cloud: 4789
First, I was surprised by the results of AsciiDocs. If you browse the Write The Docs slack, you would think everyone was using AsciiDocs. But zero jobs were listed to have AsciiDocs. I also thought how little attention was brought to the other languages technical writers would write in, XML DITA and Markdown.
What I can extract out of these numbers is that writers can be taught the tools that they will author in, but they need to know what they will be documenting.
My experience tells me that perhaps knowing markdown isn’t a skill many jobs are looking for in a writer. Instead, writers should be focusing on improving their understanding of concepts such as APIs, the Cloud, or programming langagues. Having a good understanding of the Cloud will help sell you as a technical writer. Knowing programming languages even on a basic level, will help your resume standout.
According to PopularitY of Programming Language Index, Python passed Java as the most popular programming language in 2018. Which leads me to believe, there are existing software whose documents are outdated and need technical writers to update their Java docs.
I didn’t include it, but I did find a difference in jobs being reported if I placed the skill before or after the search term technical writing. I couldn’t see any pattern but it was worth noting. If you are searching for a software technical writing job be sure to switch up your search.
If you are interested in learning about APIs I wrote an article here. What key words have you found helpful when searching for technical writing jobs? Let me know in the comments.