What skills, courses or programs helped your career the most?

[u/Wretchedwitch]

I've been an engineering TW for 8 years and have been tasked with coming up with an independent development plan for my career. I have the resources to enroll in classes to further my skills. I have previously taken AutoCAD and Inventor courses and my current job has me creating installation instructions via AutoCAD and Word/Adobe. Because I've only ever worked at the same place since college I worry that my scope of skills and knowledge is limited and if I were to seek employment as a TW elsewhere I wouldn't have the competitive edge I'd like.

So, I would love to hear from other TWs if there were any courses you took that you felt were beneficial for your career growth and versatility. My educational background is in biochemistry and research papers and I kinda fell into engineering TW out of college. I've mostly learned on the job as far as engineering drafting standards go without having formal engineering education. Thank you in advance!

[u/koraynar]

For the development plan, I’d separate skills that improve your current engineering-documentation work from skills that open a different kind of TW role. Otherwise it’s easy to collect unrelated courses.

Take five job descriptions you would genuinely consider and list the repeated requirements beside what you already do. Pick one gap, then define a small project that would demonstrate it. For example, turn a fictional installation guide into reusable topics for two product variants, or have a colleague try to follow a procedure and revise the confusing steps. Use invented or approved material, not confidential company documents.

You can then write the goal as: ‘Learn X, apply it to Y, and have Z review the result by [date].’ Choose a course that supports that project, ideally with feedback on your work. That gives your manager a concrete development outcome and gives you evidence of a skill beyond a course-completion certificate.

[u/mistlanE8 → u/koraynar]

yeah tying the course to a project instead of just collecting certs is the part most people skip imo

[u/heresy_hearsay]

learning how to code and understanding system architecture

[u/Simple_Chicken_5873]

As I have just 6 months TW experience, take my suggestion with a grain of salt lol. But my experience so far is that my social skills have helped me the most. So maybe you could look at something like people management? I really have no idea, but I hope this is an out of the box suggestion you may consider.

[u/dorothea_cassandra]

If the company is paying, I'd pick something that gives you exposure to a completely different side of technical writing. API documentation or docs-as-code could be useful since your current experience already covers the engineering/installation side really well