Meet Helena Örnehed, one of our technical writers in Lund, Sweden. Helena changed her career as a software tester to becoming a technical writer over a year ago. Today, she works on an assignment for an international MedTech company, which requires precision, flexibility, and proactivity. Helena shares with us her tips on what is essential to succeed with MedTech technical documentation.
What is vital for a technical writer in the MedTech sector?
You need to enjoy learning a lot of new things (about the product, area, and organization’s processes), be attentive to details, be conscious of risks, have a critical thinking mindset, and work fast.
You also need to be responsive to the customer’s needs and the assignment. Sometimes, the priorities change fast, and you need to adapt to them quickly. Follow the existing guidelines or, if there are no set rules, create your own structure/framework.
As a part of your daily work, you will talk to people with many different roles to get the input you need for the publication. This information can be on a technical level, and there can be a lot of different opinions on what should go into the manual. It’s your job to decide what is most important and translate all this input into something easy to understand and relevant to the end-user.
You will also need to be able to manage yourself, following up on many parallel activities in progress, which may be in different phases.
Finally, it is also essential to be creative too, for example, create images and illustrations and solve different types of problems.
What is the best thing about being a technical writer?
What I like the most about being a technical writer is being creative and solving problems with great colleagues, working with tasks that feel substantial for both users and society, and learning more about the role and different tools.
Your favorite tool?
InDesign, Illustrator, FrameMaker.