Moving on

Sometimes, a Sunday marks not just the end of a week but also the end of something familiar. Today is such a Sunday for me.

As a part-time student of the MA programme for Technical Communication and E-Learning, I work during the other “part” of the week. This blog post reflects on an experience in the technical communication field, but at work rather than at the MA programme.

Up to now, I was involved in mainly one customer project at my workplace. The rest of my work time, I spent contributing to smaller projects or our corporate social media. My aim was to a) be well informed about anything going on in and around the company, e.g., to be able to make the right decisions for the documentation we write, and b) to network and help our team to be seen and recognized as the technical communications team that anybody could approach for our tech comm services or consulting.

Recently, things have changed. We restructured our team’s tasks and responsibilities. As a consequence, I will now have to dedicate nearly all my working hours to that one customer project I already know. This somewhat puts me into the project’s documentation lead. Officially, we do not have such documentation lead positions. Still, as I will spend the most time in the project and with the customer, I will naturally become the team member that knows most about the things concerning this project.

On the one hand, I am happy to be able to shape things from now on. On the other hand, I feel that I would be scared about this responsibility if I had not studied the MA programme that I am about to complete.

Being a career changer, I used to feel there were plenty of technical communication secrets hidden from me—as if I had missed something. The companies I worked for could not help me on that issue. They could only teach me what was relevant to them and their projects and clients. Consequently, I had to look somewhere else to be educated about the whole field.

As it turned out, studying Technical Communication and E-Learning was the right thing for me. Because after nearly two years of systematically engaging in the technical communication field, I feel secure enough to start deciding matters at work and to change tools and workflows if necessary. This new chapter will start tomorrow. So, this is the last Sunday of me just doing “what they tell me”. From tomorrow on, I will begin to develop towards a decision-maker. And with all the time and effort I dedicated to the modules and assignments of the MA programme so far, I feel profoundly prepared and well aware of matters relevant to my field.

Where would new ideas come from, if I only knew how we did things at work but nothing else from the technical communication field? Only with such a broad knowledge as I gained from the MA programme, I am ready to make well-informed decisions to change things for the better at work. Towards higher usability and more efficient maintainability of our technical communication products. Challenge accepted.