That's the point of this post—I feel I'm thinking up against a brick wall when I try to imagine jobs that wouldn't fire me, so unbox away!
Have you considered tech writing?
I had not considered tech writing: I assumed it required a technical and/or scientific background which I do not have. Fluency with publishing tools is also something I'm lacking—I understand Scrivener and otherwise the only word processor I use is the ten-year-old version of Microsoft Word I've installed on every new machine since college, because the later versions are full of auto-garbage I don't need and can't turn off. I feel comfortable saying I could learn, but if the job expects me to come in with a working knowledge of Adobe Acrobat, I will feel like an idiot and not apply. I feel very badly as though everything I know is out of date. It may or may not be true, but it's demoralizing.
I do have excellent writing skills, though. I have no trouble saying that.
I can put you in touch with someone who has one of those jobs, and she can tell you more about how she got her foot in the door.
That would be extremely useful, actually. At least I could get an idea of whether it's something I could do.
Can you code at all? Can you learn?
(a) Unless HTML counts, no. The amount of Fortran I learned for the radio telescope was minimal and almost certainly useless to me outside of its original application. (b) I have no idea; I don't assume I can't. I used to learn human languages at above-average speed. I don't know if that would correlate to computers.
no subject
That's the point of this post—I feel I'm thinking up against a brick wall when I try to imagine jobs that wouldn't fire me, so unbox away!
Have you considered tech writing?
I had not considered tech writing: I assumed it required a technical and/or scientific background which I do not have. Fluency with publishing tools is also something I'm lacking—I understand Scrivener and otherwise the only word processor I use is the ten-year-old version of Microsoft Word I've installed on every new machine since college, because the later versions are full of auto-garbage I don't need and can't turn off. I feel comfortable saying I could learn, but if the job expects me to come in with a working knowledge of Adobe Acrobat, I will feel like an idiot and not apply. I feel very badly as though everything I know is out of date. It may or may not be true, but it's demoralizing.
I do have excellent writing skills, though. I have no trouble saying that.
I can put you in touch with someone who has one of those jobs, and she can tell you more about how she got her foot in the door.
That would be extremely useful, actually. At least I could get an idea of whether it's something I could do.
Can you code at all? Can you learn?
(a) Unless HTML counts, no. The amount of Fortran I learned for the radio telescope was minimal and almost certainly useless to me outside of its original application. (b) I have no idea; I don't assume I can't. I used to learn human languages at above-average speed. I don't know if that would correlate to computers.
Best of luck!
Thank you!