Personal mission statement

I will complete the PTW program for my career and personal development to grow my technical writing skills, portfolio, and confidence to become a full-time writer.

My personal statement reflects two of my career goals. One of these goals is to be a better technical writer in my current role. The other is to gain the credibility and confidence to leave the engineering field to be a full-time technical communicator.

In my current role, I spend much of my time writing, editing, and distributing documentation for my team’s tools and services. These documents are not just reference material for others on my team. Our clients are also using them. These audiences have different uses for these documents. But they both want documentation that is clear, prescriptive, and easy to follow. I want to learn how to improve my writing so that I can enable all my audiences to do the work they need to do.

I am not satisfied, however, with my current professional life as an engineer. I have learned that I am more interested in writing than engineering. That is why I want to be a full-time technical communicator. But this switch from engineer to communicator is a significant career shift for me. That means I cannot rely solely on my professional experience to give examples of how I do my work. Instead, I need to build my portfolio to prove my skill to future interviewers. I want to use the PTW program to build this portfolio.