Advice for tech writers on a job hunt in the AI age

A friend of mine recently lost her job in a layoff. She looked at her résumé with a pang of despair and asked me for advice on what she should learn next. She hasn’t thrown in the towel on technical writing yet; she wants to find another tech writing job, despite the prevailing pessimism that besieges our craft. How does one upgrade to, say, content engineering, she asked.

So we had a long phone call. We discussed traditional ways of getting up to speed and picking up new habits, like courses or books, but I didn’t have a satisfactory answer, perhaps because I believe that most of the traditional ways of training for a new job in tech are no longer effective, or haven’t been in a long while. I tried to provide some advice, but it sounded either vague or cliché.

I ended the call promising to collect my thoughts and write a post about it. I’ve already touched on similar topics, albeit for scenarios where a writer is already employed and looks for growth. I wrote on how to overcome failure and described tech writing as a landing pad, but I never wrote on how to prepare for a job search. This might be the right time.

This is what works for me. Your mileage may vary. And please remember: this is not a damn hustle pamphlet: it’s OK to feel like you can’t cope or that you can’t do any of this. Don’t neglect your health and keep this post for better times.

Forget about tech books and courses and start learning socially

Books and courses are traditional ways of learning. For senior tech writers, traditional learning won’t do. We’re living in the middle of a small technological revolution: new AI models, tools, and theories surface every week. Buying a book about anything that isn’t timeless theory or an established classic is now like buying an old newspaper: useful mainly as a historical record. Instead, stay abreast of tech news, because that’s the only thing that provides a return.

Staying up-to-date is not limited to reading Hacker News or Simon Willison’s blog: there’s also a very important social aspect to it. Join meetups in your area and enter Slack or Discord communities to replace the watercooler convos you had at work. Absorb trends, podcasts, worries, and jargon. It’s like moving to a new country: exhausting, but also exciting. In my case, I follow threads in several Slack communities where I can get a first-hand feeling of what’s cooking.

There are exceptions, of course. Books like the one CT Smith is writing, which focuses on how to sell technical writing to startup founders, are the right kind of material for this age. I, too, think that software is becoming marketing: as software becomes abundant, coding skills matter less than reputation and positioning. Docs are a service, not a deliverable: learn how to make the case for it. If you’re not a beginner, the only kind of books worth reading are the ones that teach you how to think and sell, not how to do the actual work. You already know the craft.

This is the island from Lost and we’re the castaways. We gotta crack this mystery together. You will not solve this alone with a book or a Udemy course unless you’re John Locke. Most of us aren’t knowledge survivalists, but social learners. Go and have that coffee chat about AI.

Channel the FOMO into personal projects and share them with the world

I’ve always had a hard time learning through courses, books, or videos. I almost always prefer to experiment directly, build things, then reach for reference docs. This is perhaps why I recommend project- or task-based learning over other modes. The advent of LLM agents opened up new avenues to someone like me, as if someone finally gave hands to my brain; for the first time I could turn my thoughts into action, see them materialized, and then iterate. If something doesn’t add up, I can dig into the manual, or ask the LLM to explain things to me.

The best antidote to FOMO is a personal project. Don’t ask yourself whether you need a GitHub profile or an LLM subscription: you needed them yesterday. Every time there’s a new breakthrough, I set aside some time to experiment with it with the help of AI agents. Projects like Impersonaid came to be like that: I read about it, then gave it a spin on my laptop. Handcuff your impostor syndrome and keep modesty out of the lab.

You can also build your own tutor. Using AI to learn about AI was the most powerful piece of advice I gave during that phone call. Open a project with Anthropic or OpenAI and turn on memory, so it remembers what you tried yesterday. Ask it to draft a syllabus using its research tools, then tune its tone and style until it teaches the way you learn. Build your own learning experience.

Last but not least, you must share the results of your explorations, either in a community, on your blog, or, even better, both. It’s a fantastic way of learning how to sell and socialize your ideas. It’s also a great way of generating the kind of artificial pressure that makes projects land on time.

Networking matters more than formatting your résumé (leave that to AI)

One thing I stressed over the phone is that, in my experience, networking is the single most important thing you can do to land a new job. In Tips for job hunting as a tech writer (written in 2023, but still valid for the most part) I recommended that folks looking for work in the tech sector should rely on referrals, which account for 30 to 50% of all hires. The networking aspect extends to interviews: treat the interview as a social occasion. They might remember you.

I’ve been in interviews where I noticed the person in front of me wanting to be somewhere else – in such situations, making a conscious effort to make it an enjoyable chat between colleagues always paid off.

Your résumé, meanwhile, has gotten two audiences now: the systems that ingest and process it, and the humans who decide whether they want to meet you. Satisfy the machine, but write for the human. Lead with your story, your impact, and the things you care about. This Forbes article recommends focusing on alignment with the job’s requirements, measurable impact and humanity:

“Put your quantifiable metrics, put your accomplishments, change the tone, change the wording, because as recruiters we’re getting 15 of the same résumés for one job, and you lose credibility immediately as a candidate.”

Our future roles are not determined by our certifications, but by what we do and show. Let the world know what you’re determined to do and what sort of things pique your interest. Your experiments are your portfolio. Some folks have built a reputation just by curating information on what’s going on in tech, and by creating tools and benchmarks (consider, for instance, Dachary Carey’s fabulous work on skills). If nothing comes to mind, share your frustrations.

Optimism requires some assembly

Hope, I think, looks less like a pill you swallow (or a book you read, or a course you take) and more like a LEGO set you have to assemble patiently. All the pieces are in there, along with a picture on the front of what you might build, but nobody hands you the finished thing. At some point you’ll swear a piece is missing. You put it together afternoon by afternoon: a coffee chat here, a side project there, a call that goes nowhere but teaches you something anyway. It’s fine.

Hope rarely comes out looking exactly like the box. Build it anyway. My friend is still snapping pieces together. So am I, most days.