For those curious about why I haven’t been as engaged with technical communication community lately is that I’ve embarked on a multi-year Masters of Technical and Professional Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Stout.

Photo by Mike Greer – Pexels.

I’ve simply been keeping my head in books and continuing my job working for the marketing team.

Let me share with you why I am pursuing a Masters degree and also some of the most interesting perspective about attending this program a few years after graduating with a Bachelor’s degree.

After graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Technical Communication from New Mexico Tech, I felt I needed to take a break from spending nearly six years of my life achieving (failing and repeating courses) an education to get this Bachelor of Science degree.

I have to express this strongly: go for the Bachelor of Science degree if you are ever presented the choice between a Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Science. More and more often, I’m noticing that you need experience understanding with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to fully compete in the world of technical communication. I also suggest taking a few management courses so you can understand how an organization works.

With that in hand and nearly eight years after graduating from New Mexico Tech, I want to pursue showing more and more people the importance of technical communication and how it plays a role in the business and education world.

Taking advantage of tuition reimbursement by my employer, this was a great opportunity to elevate my experience and add more to the field of technical communication.

For example, much of our working world is now dominated by computers and mobile devices. To design such systems requires much more than slapping on some text and creating some code. It requires a technical approach to write and develop content.

My goal with a Masters degree is to demonstrate my teaching skills as well as hone in my own approach to technical communication. My world is split between marketing, social media, web content, and content strategy. There really is a lot to go about in this field and build upon the thousands of others who have built the framework of technical communication and content strategy.

Photo by Nao Triponez – Pexels

One of my plans is to publish a series that is much more focused on The Content Strategy Magazine, a new publication I created earlier in the year. Perhaps you can check it out sometime, it still is in its infancy stage.

Hope to see some of you soon on the conference trail! Until then, back to studying and working on my Masters program.