Technical Writer Interview Questions
3 min readOct 24, 2018
People are usually afraid of job interviews. Why? Because of uncertainty -they don’t know what they should expect — who is a potential employer, how a company looks like and what questions an employer will ask. Well, it’s difficult to foresee everything but you can prepare for interview questions.
Here is a list of questions that your potential employer may ask.
General Questions
- Can you tell me about yourself?
- What are your strengths and weaknesses?
- How is it comfortable for you to communicate with other people?
- Why do you want to work in our company?
- Are you OK working 40-plus hours a week?
Portfolio Questions
- Can you show me your portfolio?
- What role did you play in developing this [this work sample]?
- How much time did you spend for this project?
- Who else worked with you on this project? What were their roles?
- Describe one of your most successful projects.
Technical Writing Questions
- Why do you want to become a technical writer?
- Tell us more about your experience in this sphere
- What certification courses did you take in this sphere?
- Do you have a degree?
- (if you worked in tech writing before) What projects were you working on?
- What tools did you use for developing technical documentation?
- What tools did you use for creating visual content?
- Have you ever created videos?
- Have you ever worked with SMEs? If yes, please tell us about your experience.
- What technical skills do you have? Do you know HTML or a programming language?
What else should you expect from an interview? There can be a test that will check your language skills, so, it will be useful to refresh your grammar and vocabulary knowledge.
What materials can help you prepare for a job interview? Well, I have answers to some of these questions:
- Portfolio. Here is my post on building a killing tech writing portfolio.
- Technical writing tool. If you are a novice and use only MS Word for writing, I can recommend you ClickHelp. This is an intuitive tool that will help you write documentation professionally.
- Experience. If you don’t have experience in technical writing, here is a list of resources where you can write documentation for big companies, startups, and developers: Resources to Get Practice in Technical Writing.
Moreover, I recommend that you read these posts including books and courses: