Wojtek Makowski: From translator to documentation specialist

For over a decade, Wojtek worked as a translator of technical and legal texts. Unfortunately, the situation in that industry kept getting worse, and Wojtek didn't intend to wait and see what tomorrow would bring. He decided to take action and enrolled in postgraduate studies in technical communication at Vistula University. Near the end of the year, one of his lecturers pointed the group toward an ongoing recruitment for a technical writer position at Etteplan. "It was like defending my thesis on a live subject. While still studying, I took part in a recruitment process for a role that, until then, had been completely unfamiliar to me," Wojtek recalls.

At the interview, he met Hania Makowska, Area Manager, and Magda Piszko, Team Leader, who walked him through the career path at Etteplan. He, in turn, presented the experience he'd gained as a translator working with technical texts, combined with his freshly acquired knowledge of technical communication theory. "It turned out we were a good fit and we found a common flow. The remote work model suited me too, since I'm based in Warsaw and our office is in Wrocław," says Wojtek. That's how he joined the fast-growing team as a Junior Documentation Specialist.

During his first project, Wojtek had a lot of freedom to shape his own work. He wrote a software user-interface manual from scratch, built the document structure himself, and picked up the basics of Illustrator along the way. His current project, carried out for one of Etteplan's key clients in the industrial machinery sector, has a different character. He started there almost as a trial run, rewriting and updating old manuals into a new format, and today he's built a reputation strong enough that the client leaves him a great deal of independence, with a queue of projects already lined up for next year.

Today, as a Documentation Specialist, Wojtek is responsible for creating installation, operation and maintenance manuals for industrial machinery. He works in a CCMS - a component content management system. What's more, he regularly runs meetings with the engineers and designers behind the machines to gather the technical knowledge needed for the documentation, as well as with illustrators to determine what should appear in the drawings. These meetings often lead to a valuable exchange of insights. "I'm not an engineer, so I look at the product from a different perspective than the team members who built it. There have been cases where my questions led to improvements in the product while it was still being designed," Wojtek explains. "You could say I take part in creating the products themselves. I write the manual for a machine that isn't even on the market yet. That's fascinating," he adds.

Wojtek considers his greatest professional achievement to be learning things he'd never done before: from writing manuals (instead of translating them), to working with new tools, to Simplified Technical English (STE), a stripped-down writing style that makes text easier to understand worldwide and easier to translate into languages as different as Chinese or Arabic. "I hadn't realised that being a technical writer is so much more than just writing. You have to think through how to plan an entire document and do it with the future in mind, with the next similar machines in mind," Wojtek explains. Information architecture, and the skill of telling what matters from informational noise, turned out to be a new, unexpected area of growth for him.

What Wojtek values about working at Etteplan is the Technical Communication and Data Solutions team. "For years I was a freelancer collaborating with small translation agencies. Before I joined Etteplan, I was worried it would be a typical corporation where people compete with each other. I was very pleasantly surprised. In our team, everyone is kind and helps each other out," says Wojtek. One story in particular stuck with him. "The day after my first Winter Party, where I got to talk to the whole team and meet everyone face to face, an error popped up in the CCMS tool. Two colleagues from the team, Magda and Basia, dropped what they were doing on their own initiative and spent two hours tracking down the cause until they finally found it. It was a revelation for me, seeing someone help you completely selflessly," he recalls.

Wojtek is proof that stepping out of an illusory comfort zone can bring far more good than you'd expect. New opportunities, growth, wonderful people without that first step toward change, none of these other good experiences would have simply appeared on their own.